Rethinking Human-Nature Relationships in the Time of Coronavirus: Postmodern Animism in Films by Miyazaki Hayao & Shinkai Ma
Volume 18 | Issue 16 | Number 6 | Article ID 5455 | Aug 15, 2020 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Rethinking Human-Nature Relationships in the Time of Coronavirus: Postmodern Animism in Films by Miyazaki Hayao & Shinkai Makoto Shoko Yoneyama change, Anthropocene, animism, postmodern Abstract: Issues we are confronted with in the animism, nature, spirituality, human-nature age of the Anthropocene, such as climate relationship, Miyazaki Hayao, Studio Ghibli, change, extinction, and the coronavirusShinkai Makoto, life-world, spiritual-world, pandemic demand a fundamental rethink of Tenki no Ko, Weathering with You human-nature relationships, but at the same time we are faced with a ‘crisis of imagination’, which is highlighted by the paucity of stories or Korean translation published in a narratives that enable us to fully engage with magazine Green Review is available here. these issues. We have a ‘climate crisis’ as well as a ‘crisis of culture’ and both derive from the same source: epistemological limitations in the paradigm of modernity. The most problematic 1. Introduction limitation is the fact that our social scientific knowledge has blind spots when it comes to As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps around the nature and spirituality which makes it almost world, it is not hard to predict that ‘there is impossible for us to rethink human-nature going to be a quite radical rethinking about our relationships in a meaningful way. Miyazaki way of life’.1 The longer this crisis lasts, the Hayao and Shinkai Makoto, however, directly deeper this rethink will be. But how deep, illuminate these blind spots by making nature should or could it go? For example, the need to and spirituality central features in theirrethink human-nature relationships has been animation films.
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