we think too much & feel too little

“The 9000 who never made it home”. Project dedicated to those who died in the D-Day Landings which happened on this day in 1944.

The 9000 Who Never Made It Home was a haunting, large-scale art installation created on the beaches of Normandy in 2013 to mark International Peace Day and honor those who died during the D-Day landings.

British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss, along with a team of over 500 volunteers, used stencils and rakes to etch 9,000 human silhouettes into the sand of Arromanches beach, each figure representing a soldier or civilian who lost their life on June 6, 1944.

I hope everyone finds a job like that honestly. Work you enjoy and find meaningful and that you keep coming back to. They say that once you retire, your health declines faster actually.

Which seems wild, given how gentle and hopeful his movies tend to be. But I think that's kind of the point for him. He uses his films to find comfort and joy in a world that he knows can be painful and difficult. Making hopeful and joyful films is a calling and a distraction, it's aspirational.

It's why we get memes like this-

He's also exactly the embodiment of this-

“I was born in 1941… and had a strong feeling in my childhood that we had ‘fought a truly stupid war’. Many times… I heard adults speak boastfully of the horrible things they had done on the Chinese continent. At the same time, I also heard about the extent of the horrors of the air raids [on Japan]. I heard many stories and I started to think that I had been born in a country that had done stupid things and I truly started to hate Japan.”

Before this revelation, however, Miyazaki said when he was a teenager he often argued with his father, trying to make his father acknowledge his responsibilities in the war as someone who managed a factory where they made war planes. He and his father often argued about this, because Miyazaki's father himself had no patriotism and merely did the work for the good money it brought in (which ties into Japan's economical difficulties before the war which is too much history to go into here) which meant he could remove himself emotionally from his work, whereas Miyazaki wanted him to acknowledge his part in the bloodshed. I cannot find direct sources to say otherwise, but I believe he also managed to reconcile this part of his father's life, as Miyazaki has grown to love planes and flight for their own sake, removed from their function as tools of war. Which he illustrates in "The Wind Rises".

He sometimes speaks of a Japan he hopes for in the future. One that turns further away from Nuclear power and instead refocuses on strengthening Japan's bonds to its natural landscapes and beauties.

“… I started to understand just how much I love the plants and the natural world of these islands. If there were no people, I thought, the Japanese islands would be unbelievably beautiful. I became aware that it wasn’t the nation or the rising sun flag that I loved, but it was the land that is truly special.”

The doomer Miyazaki memes are funny... but they also make me a little sad. Because they are true, but most people forget why.