In the Age of Winners, Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do? Probably Not.

Making rivers in the desert.

Editor’s note: You usually find our author here in the proofreader’s seat.

Two Crises, and Preferring Neither

An analysis of Weathering with You might begin with Hodaka’s inner monologue on the night he and Hina take refuge in that luxury hotel: God, I don’t want anything more now. I just want this moment to last. Something along those lines.

Let us pause here and ask: what would Hodaka, Hina, and Senpai—Hina’s younger brother Nagi—have to overcome for “this moment to last”? This brings us to the dilemma that so many “reviews” of Weathering with You have offered, deliberately or otherwise: either flood Tokyo or lose Hina. With the choice framed this way, keeping the moment alive naturally leads us toward flooding Tokyo. That also seems to be the answer the film favors. Yet this reading entirely misses a crucial “lack” in the film’s narrative structure. As Miao-ge points out in “A Rainstorm That May Not Exist—When ‘Sekai-kei’ Meets ‘Sociality,’” the story is structured around two crises that have no inherent connection:

• Tokyo’s torrential-rain crisis, an imaginary natural disaster.

• A crisis of social administration: the forces of social governance, represented by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, try to “send each of them back to their own home.”

Suppose there were no rain crisis at all, no supernatural sunshine girl, no sacrificial premise. Could young Hodaka’s naive wish for “this moment to last” come true even then? Absolutely not. Conversely, suppose the police had not arrived quite so quickly—from this point onward, the plot practically sprints. Wouldn’t the gentle Hina still “voluntarily” heed the unconscious prayers of Tokyo’s people and sacrifice herself? Through a peculiar narrative maneuver, the story grafts the two crises together. This traps so many “reviews” in a binary loop: either side with utility, public order, and good morals, condemning the hero’s choice—and Makoto Shinkai’s—as affected adolescent grandiosity; or fall into a cheap identification with him, desperately defending a love that would abandon ten thousand people to save the beloved. Here I have to sound like a broken record: “…No. I would prefer not to take either option.”¹ We must step back from these all-too-naive declarations of where we stand and confront the gap between the film’s two crises.

Love as Fetish, and the Quasi-Family

Let us recall one particularly invasive, violent shot. Hodaka runs into the abandoned building, with the police in pursuit. He picks up a handgun and points it at them—who are, plainly, quite innocent. In close-up, the barrel points straight at the dumbfounded audience, seated within the cinematic apparatus.

My point in the previous section was that even if Hina had not vanished as a sacrifice, the little quasi-family she, Hodaka, and Senpai had formed would still have been broken up by the forces of social discipline, “for your own good.” But if the story really went that way, the protagonist would clearly have no legitimate reason to resort to violence. A deus ex machina is therefore required. Because Hina has been offered up as a sacrifice, the hero can undertake a series of decidedly transgressive acts of resistance, driven by a basic emotional impulse that also provides the bare minimum grounds for the audience’s empathy: bringing back the shrine maiden Hina, whom Tokyo’s “sunny everyday life” has utterly abjected—cast out as excrement. Let me venture a somewhat rash judgment: the rain crisis becomes an imaginary external enemy. Through this prop—and only by relying on it—Makoto may be staging, allegorically, a crisis of antagonism within society itself.

All right, having come this far, let me brave the barrage of accusations of “overinterpretation” and go on to ask how Hodaka, Hina, and Senpai fight this crisis. We immediately have to think of one of the film’s theme songs, and of this article’s title: in the age of winners, “Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do?”² The first weapon is undoubtedly love, and the “quasi-family” built firmly upon it. If you want to know what a quasi-family is, look it up on Baidu, or get a feel for it in Shoplifters, which Makoto himself named as one of his creative inspirations.

To start by parroting our predecessors: Chie Nakane, a Japanese sociologist of the older generation [Note 1], characterizes Japanese social groups as giving greater weight to family ties than to blood ties. She emphasizes that groups are built around the places in which people share their lives; families are no exception. Perhaps this historical and cultural inheritance explains why so many Japanese works of art and literature like to depict quasi-families, with all their warmth and love.

But what can we grasp in this fetishization of the quasi-family? As we watch it gather scattered people together, over and over, forming firm bonds and love, what we see is precisely that society itself has already fallen apart, and that blood-related families themselves have already fallen apart too. Put another way, what makes the power of quasi-familial love so precious has nothing to do with how these groups based on shared living spaces actually organize themselves. It has to do instead with the sheer capacity for self-indulgent fantasy among those peeling away, peeling away from the big Other (a pun—how suggestive).

Ah, quasi-family! How mighty you are! People not only elevate quasi-family, love, and bonds into an untouchable supreme authority; they also use this rag to cover up the fact of social antagonism, roaring away all the while. The fault, I would argue, is not in daring to love. It is that one side of the film ultimately offers us a powerless ideological consolation: things are…well, terrible, but at least we still have love. Ah, love! How great you are! You can protect high-school, middle-school, and elementary-school children who have lost their parents’ protection from police pursuit and the gaze of sex-industry recruiters!

But here, I think, Makoto holds his ground. At the level of what the forces of social governance see as a crisis of administration, the film lets love fail. Under the onslaught of the police and the Child Guidance Center, love, bonds, and quasi-family are like shadows burned away by sunlight. They don’t last a single night, blah blah blah. Having love and bonds, forming a quasi-family, does not mean you can overcome every obstacle. Not happening. When we read shōnen manga or popular fiction, we are often astonished by the absurd cheats the protagonist gets handed. Caught between social institutions and villainous BOSSes, an ordinary person would have gone down long ago; the (male) protagonist can turn everything around through guts/courage/youthful innocence and romanticism. We have to ask: where do all these miracles and all this love come from? The excessive display and exaltation of love actually expose the fact that, apart from love, we have nothing and can do nothing. So the better course really is to let love fail, to expose its lack and powerlessness. Only on that foundation can genuinely meaningful bonds and resistance be produced.

It would be easy to bring up Shoplifters here and rehearse its plot. But the first thing “quasi-family” brings to my mind is Family Project, the bishōjo visual novel Romeo Tanaka (Rewrite, Humanity Has Declined) wrote in 2001. Isn’t that title direct enough? What is the resemblance? A male protagonist on the margins of the metropolis, no longer believing in his biological family, meets a group of men and women. They establish a quasi-family, hoping to regain love and bonds through it.

Both works leave us with a compromise ending. In the main narrative of each individual heroine’s route in Family Project, the family project is never saved. Under the threat of gangster violence, it falls apart, falls apart. And as we come to know each route more closely, we learn that although the gangsters’ threats trigger the breakup, every member of the family project has wounds of their own. Each has symbolic debts that family bonds and solidarity cannot simply settle, debts they must still confront and resolve for themselves. They leave not because the gangsters’ threats are so powerful, but because the bonds themselves—bonds they are trying to sustain as a fantasy against so terrible a background—are fragile.

Even so, Family Project grants its hero some degree of redemption in every route, or at least the promise of it, through union with a beautiful girl. Still love! This imaginary consolation for otaku is a compromise a commercial text-based game has to make. We all know how little respect the publisher D.O. had for Romeo Tanaka, and how the label “poison for sales” has dogged him. In Weathering with You, regrettably, we find another half-hearted compromise: fine, I, Hodaka, chose Hina, and yes, it’s been raining for three years, but nobody died, did they? We can still have everyday life in a new Tokyo, just without sunshine. And by the way, although I was forcibly isolated and kept under observation for three years, and those three years were miserable, I still got my romance with Hina in the end. Jealous?

Damn it!

Here I agree that a more uncompromising outcome would be this: Hodaka brings Hina back, but both lose all memory of each other. Tokyo’s flooding really does cause great social destruction, and that destruction is laid bare without being given meaning—think of Patlabor 2: The Movie and its sustained depictions of the city’s new, silent everyday life. Only the ring remains, gripped tightly by Hodaka as he lies unconscious on the ground. That little object, so hard to erase…³

Subjective Violence and Systemic Violence

All right, the first weapon—love, bonds, quasi-family—didn’t last a single night. The heroine has disappeared too (sad). So what now? Hodaka’s first choice is not to trust the adults. He escapes from the police, who had not actually intended to do anything to him, and a furious chase ensues. Let me answer a question raised by my friend Z: couldn’t both sides stop running and talk? Couldn’t Hodaka explain himself and have the kindly officers drive him to the building for a look?

This is easy enough to answer: 1. They have, of course, communicated. 2. It didn’t work. To begin with, the protagonist does not address the adult world directly. He communicates through his genuinely older mentor, Keisuke Suga. Shouldn’t that tell us something? When the police and Child Guidance Center visit Hina’s home, Hodaka hides in the bathroom to avoid them. Once out, he has a conversation with Suga, who tells him, “Grow up, kid.” After running all the way to the abandoned building, Hodaka runs straight into Suga again. Once again, Suga speaks for the adult world, urging him to hurry back to the police, explain the situation, and make his peace with the adults.

Hodaka is not silent in either conversation. He tries to say something, but it is no use. In return, he first receives the fare home, then a kick to bring him to his senses: carrot and stick. And in the car, when he tearfully recounts what happened to him and Hina’s sacrifice, all he gets from the driver is an anxious “Does he need a psychiatric assessment?” From beginning to end, the adult world treats everything Hodaka and Hina have experienced—the rain crisis and their extraordinary encounter with sacrifice—as the speech of the mentally ill. How could these two sides, at a moment of life and death, engage in “communication within the normative order”?

“Sacrifice just one person, and Tokyo gets its sunny everyday life back. Anyone would agree to that, wouldn’t they?” Quite so: this is what a normal person says. It also seems to be the attitude of “most people.” Anyone who opposes this utilitarian mode of governance is a lunatic whom normal society must kick out. In this dead end, if Makoto does anything right, it is refusing to submit to the biopolitical logic of utilitarian governance. He lets the hero keep resisting with his second weapon—even if that means picking up a handgun that appears like a ghost, and seems so ludicrously outmatched on its own. From the universally applauded love and bonds of the quasi-family, the film swings straight into a dimension of violence that shocks the public and makes it retch.

“None of you understand—or you’re all pretending not to!” Hodaka screams himself hoarse. His hysterical questioning challenges all those ideological interpellations telling him, “We’re sending you home, so you can be a proper, ordinary Japanese high-school student. It’s for your own good.” In this questioning, and in the accompanying gunshot—“between heaven and earth, a vast expanse, utterly clean”—I can just barely catch Makoto’s fleeting radicalism here.⁴

Where does this irrational violence come from? I cannot help recalling that tragic joke which, I seem to remember, even appears in high-school textbooks:

A Nazi official visits Picasso’s studio. Seeing the famous modernist painting Guernica, he is shocked by its chaos, violence, and utter lack of classical beauty. “Did you paint this?” he asks. Picasso calmly replies, “No, sir. You did.”⁵

Isn’t there something symptomatic in the public’s disgust at Hodaka’s use of subjective violence to resist the discipline of the established order? Doesn’t that disgust find its embodiment in the police inspector’s conspicuous pompadour? All this meaningless violence by metropolitan outcasts and delinquents needs a dose of even stronger violence to sort it out! By condemning the violent dimension of Hodaka’s resistance, doesn’t this attitude drown out other forms of intense violence? The systemic violence of institutions of social control against marginal people who cannot be accommodated within the category of the normal person, for instance? Or the systemic violence that the sex industry—representing the economic system operating under so-called multicultural tolerance—inflicts on the poor, with women bearing the worst of it? What we must do here is precisely change the topic. We must extract ourselves from the endless arguments over whether the handgun’s appearance and use make sense, and calmly reply: “No, sir. You fired the shot.”

Tokyo, the Torii, and Hodaka’s Decision

From the old man at the shrine, we learn that traditional society often had to sacrifice a shrine maiden capable of speaking with heaven—and its weather—in order to heal the weather and restore social harmony. Clearly, this is necessary not only for traditional society but also for Tokyo, that exemplary city of late modernity. How could it not be? And so we see a torii, a shrine gateway, growing strangely among Tokyo’s skyscrapers, and a shrine maiden who has consequently put on a neck ring—or whatever it’s called. Hina.

Let us inspect Hodaka’s allies once more. Hodaka: a runaway boy who felt he could not breathe back in his rural hometown. Hina and Senpai: children still of compulsory-school age, living alone without parental guardianship. Miss Natsumi: an unemployed young woman repeatedly failing job interviews, hysterically shouting, “Your company is my first choice!” Half a Keisuke Suga: once a runaway boy himself, now a tabloid writer, classified by his mother-in-law as someone who “always did seem unreliable”—an indelible symbolic registration…

A glance around this group already tells us something. These are all people on the margins, minorities who have left society’s normal tracks. At first glance, indeed, Tokyo’s sunny everyday life could sacrifice not just Hina but this whole group, and the social order would not so much as sneeze. I noticed how strongly rail transport makes its presence felt in the film. Not because of the famous “a train passes and my lover disappears” GIF, but because of the low, unsettling roar of trains crossing the foreground. The sound’s invasive force makes palpable the possibility that the protagonists’ everyday life could be crushed at any moment. Remember where Hina’s home stands: right beside the ceaseless rail traffic. Every ten or so minutes, another electric train passes, shaking and jolting this pitifully small household.

And after Miss Natsumi’s motorcycle helps Hodaka shake off police pursuit, we see the escape route he chooses—is this your escape route, Hodaka? He runs along the tracks, stripped of their economic use by the torrential rain. The rain has severed the rail system that supports the economy of Tokyo, this city of late modernity: an objective vortex of a system with no controlling subject to be found, lines that shake and jolt the quasi-family’s modest everyday life from less than a hundred meters away. Meanwhile, the normal people still on the normal tracks—more firmly on rails than ever, though they need no rails—take out their phones to record and ridicule the stupidity of Hodaka running along the railway. Good God, he’s running where the trains are supposed to run! What is interesting here is a question at the level of the film’s own reception: aren’t viewers who question and mock the plausibility of Hodaka’s resistance and flight becoming one with the bystanders holding up their phones to watch and take pictures? It would be worthwhile to speculate about what Makoto might intend by staging these scenes this way.

It may be useful here to invoke a perhaps rather vulgarized Deleuzian minoritarian stance. There is no majority in which you and I can find a secure place in life. We are all minorities, continually emerging and being created through difference. The abstract majority and normality of an essentialist understanding are themselves a violence that must be rejected. When I see people solemnly pretending to weigh their lover against XXX other people, then striking the youthfully defiant pose of “I choose my lover,” I really don’t know what to say. You think your lover will get to be “the one”? No. Just a numerical cost under utilitarian governance. And you never have any power to choose in the first place. This, I think, is precisely what the English subtitle Weathering with You hints at: we should stand with this “you,” with minorities continually emerging and being created through difference, and weather it together. We should neither put on a show of siding with the majority nor take a hot-blooded romantic stand for one person. We must avoid that trap.

The sacrifice of Hina and Hodaka must be understood, strictly, as the sacrifice of countless people. The film’s “normalizing arrangements” for them are an expression of post-political governance of life and policing. In Weathering with You, we do not see the elections and elected representatives that appear in Your Name. We see only the Child Guidance Center and the Metropolitan Police Department, responsible for welfare and public order. This structure of expert administration necessarily produces non-functional, irrational violence. Like a remainder that cannot be eliminated by the killing power of the symbolic order’s signifiers, it returns from the Real at an unexpected moment—just as the handgun keeps appearing inexplicably in this film.

Since we have come to the torii, let me venture another sweeping remark: Weathering with You seems to distance itself from Your Name in its attitude toward tradition. In Your Name, the shrine maiden’s miraculous power to cross time and space—the mouth-chewed sake?—produces a happy reunion for all. In Weathering with You, Hodaka makes himself clear: “Hina, you’re no longer a sunshine girl/shrine maiden. Healing the weather doesn’t matter anymore.” The neck ring, symbol of the shrine maiden and of tradition, comes undone. Nor is the ecology of the sky, accessed through the torii that plays this disreputable role in Tokyo, some pastoral haven. It is merely a place of chaos that assimilates its sacrificial victims. Hina’s powers as a shrine maiden are likewise shown to have a violent dimension. People tend to remember only their beautiful, sunny side. Sad. When the police knock Hodaka to the ground, Hina directly summons lightning to blow up a truck—fortunately unoccupied, Makoto reassures us—diverting attention so they can escape. Why not dare to think one step further? Why couldn’t this power be used for something more antagonistic?

The next question to pursue in defending Hodaka is whether his decision and resistance amount to a neoliberal decisionism that takes no position, concerned only with survival. To put it more vividly: how does his resistance differ from that in Battle Royale, where you don’t ask why someone shoots, because the answer is simply, I need to survive—it’s you or me? I think the foregoing has already given you the answer. Decision and the friend–enemy distinction in the Schmittian moment take place strictly beneath a sky in which the ideological gods are at war. Decisionism in the context of Japanese neoconservatism lacks that premise. Its post-political decisions concern only survival, or at most a beautiful girl as well. Hodaka’s resistance in this film, to my mind, is clearly not only for himself or Hina. It is political resistance on behalf of a group whose sacrifice Hina represents, against a social system that “pretends not to understand” their sacrifice. If we do not acknowledge this dimension, the resistance is ineffective. It will still be drawn back into Tokyo’s great machine of everyday life. Indeed, the resistance and the cheap identification it arouses may become excellent nourishment for Tokyo’s consumer culture. Think of those cheap, romantically sympathetic responses to the film: better that I wrong the whole world than let the whole world wrong me (or my beautiful girl). That’s good, good, so good!⁶ And I think this is also why the resistance has to be represented through violence on a shocking scale: gunshots, Tokyo flooded—although still softened by a gentle retouching. Anything less, it seems, could not sufficiently shock and estrange audiences who have already seen their fill of rebellious-teen dramas. This sense of distance and strangeness gives them some slight chance of thinking about the world beyond the film.

Finally, Hodaka’s choice and resistance not only leave the rain crisis unresolved and bring it upon Tokyo; they certainly do not resolve the crisis of social administration that threatens to break them apart. The hero is expelled back to his rural hometown for three years of isolation and observation. Perhaps a certain phantom thief, newly arrived in Tokyo, comes to mind here…⁷ We are given a compromised outcome: Tokyo is still functioning perfectly well, and Hodaka and Hina finally get their romance. GOOD END. But one thing is worth noting, as my friend Y reminds me. Faced with the adults’ discourse—“The world was always crazy, hahaha! You really think you caused all this never-ending rain? How funny!”—Hodaka nevertheless chooses, in the end, to believe that he and Hina really did once “change the shape of the world.”

Yes: although the adults’ discursive world gives their account no credence at all, by holding firmly to that imaginary rain crisis and to the choices he and Hina had, Hodaka preserves an image of himself as someone with the power to choose and change the shape of the world—even though such a power has never existed within the normal workings of the symbolic order. I have little desire to defend this imaginary construction. Still, it is a little better than becoming a mature adult the moment you graduate from high school. What remains open to criticism is an otaku form of imaginary redemption. Notice the blank where this kid Hodaka’s reflection over those three years should be. Only when he sees Hina, now a high-school girl, does he go, “Ahhh, no, Hina and I really did change the shape of the world!” Only through the beautiful girl do his decisions and sacrifices acquire a meaning he can weigh. The purity of his resistance is pretty dismal, as you can see. Without Hina, Hodaka would probably have changed sides. This ambiguity, this overall impression of compromised resistance and weakness, makes the film what Miao-ge calls a half-finished “chimera.” All I can do is hope that next time Makoto goes further, does better, and is more resolute.

Let us end by repeating the title!

In this age of winners, this age when rulers and gods alike wear expressions of indifference, is there still anything that love can do? The theme song affirms it over and over, but with love alone, probably not. This does not, of course, mean that love is unnecessary. On the contrary, we must throw away the rag of our fetishization of love, bonds, and quasi-family, and see the antagonism arising within society itself, roaring away in earnest. We must withdraw from obsessively focusing on and debating subjective violence and the binary choice—either utilitarian expert governance or hot-blooded romantic identification—and change the topic to systemic symbolic violence: invisible, yet determining the grid within which subjective violence erupts.

Related Articles from Lab on Roof

• A Rainstorm That May Not Exist—When “Sekai-kei” Meets “Sociality”
• “Tragic Hero—Knight of Infinite Resignation—Knight of Faith”
• Becoming Your “It’ll Be All Right”—Reflections on Weathering with You
• “Why Can the Mere Appearance of the Sky Move Us So Deeply?”
• “Island Universes,” “Sekai-kei,” “Masochism”