Your Name: What's Missing From Life?

Your Name is not a movie you would normally consider up my alley. In fact, I was forced to watch it by our channel artist Gosaibu who decided to rent it with my debit card. I went into it eyes rolling and heavy sighing, and came out the other end touched. Released in 2016 by Toho and directed by Makoto Shinkai, aka the dude everyone calls the new Miyazaki, Your Name is a story about values, connection, and tradition more than love. But love is there, it's definitely there. It's also one of the highest grossing animated films to leave the island. What starts off as a very anime rendition of Freaky Friday twists and turns itself into a spectacular showcase of perception vs. groundation, past and future, and human roots vs. globalization. Japan, more so than most other first world countries, is a land where the past meets the future and finds a way to live mostly in harmony with itself. A harmony lacking in those of us that feel an emptiness in our gut from time to time. The feeling that we're missing something desperately, but can never figure out exactly what it is. A question never posed, but instead felt. What am I missing? A comet streaks over japan and two high school kids miles apart look up at the same time to watch as pieces of it break off, creating a celestial showcase unseen for thousands of years. In Tokyo, a boy named Taki, and in a small town in the Hida prefecture, a girl named Mitsuha. I'm not gonna get into the intricacies of the animation, but let this scene and the rest of the video speak for itself. Your name is beautiful, and we'll leave it at that. After what I originally found as a goofy bumbling OP, Taki awakens in a body not his own, which he discovers by fondling his new bubulas in a very relatable way. This body is Mitsuha's who seems to have reclaimed it by the next day with no recollection of Taki's, for lack of a better term, possession. She does admit that she's been having some weird dreams about another life recently, but they're hazy and she can't remember them well. Turns out these dreams weren't really dreams, and she's also been spending time in Taki's body in Tokyo while he was in Itomori as Mitsuha. So quirky, so teeny. The distinction of these characters lives is immediately drawn. Itomori is nestled in the mountains of Hida on a large lake created by a meteor thousands of years ago. Mitsuha lives with her grandmother and little sister, her family owns the local Shinto shrine. There's an emphasis on nature in her surroundings, a brook runs directly under her home, and her family still practices ancient traditions. The Shinto religion is fascinating, it doesn't have a ton of rules, it doesn't have a specific scripture, how it's practiced is regional and variant. It's the kind of practice I can get behind because of it's general lack of hate and reverence towards the spirit of the natural. In it's most basic sense, Shinto is the worship of kami. In english we relate kami to gods, but that's simply because we don't have a word to depict the kami themselves. Just like the japanese word meion means light and dark, we don't have the word, which means we don't have the concept. However, as we can see with Taki, modern life has very little room for appreciation of nature, aka the worship of kami. In the city, life moves fast, money exchanges hands, culture is blended, tradition is lost, people become cogs in a machine and feed the fire of progression. However, underneath the concrete remains the land to which we're born and bound, which is a tie not so easily undone by simply ignoring it. As one of her practices, Mitsuha creates traditional japanese braided cords using the kumihimo style. Braids are 7 times stronger than a regular textile, and the way of creating intricate and strong cords cannot be mechanized, so it maintains it's roots as a therapeutic human art. Listen to the thread's voice. When you twine it round and round like this, feeling will start flowing between you and the thread. Etched within our braided cords is a thousand years of itomori's history. When focused completely on an action, people lose sight of themselves. Have you ever gotten home from a car ride and forgot how you got there? That's the feeling of acting naturally without thoughts of yourself, being in the moment. What Mitsuha's grandmother is saying is that the threads they bind hold this kind of energy, the feelings and thoughts which flow out through meditation. Despite the written history of their traditions being burned away hundreds of years ago, the Miyamizu family maintains these traditions in respect to their beneficence. As Taki and Mitsuha swap bodies, they begin to communicate through notes and text, becoming more and more intertwined in each other's lives. Their souls crisscrossing back and forth, braiding a cord. Most things can be kami and are worshipped as such, from a river to a person, to possibly something as benign as a sword or a toothbrush. Braids are tied around some kami to mark them as sacred. Kami exist and inhabit as spirit, generally of nature, so many things can have kami nature, thus making them revered as kami. This divinity is pure, so in order to witness it a person must achieve mogokoro or purification, which is granted by the kami itself, again, be it a tree or a rock. How does one achieve mogokoro? By holding up the four pretty legit affirmations of shinto. Keep your family in tradition, love nature, don't be a scrub and wash that ass, and take some time to appreciate the kami. As a shinto priestess, Mitsuha performs in ceremony creating kuchi kamizaki as an offering for the kami of itomori. Kuchi kamizaki is literally translated to mouth kami liquor, basically it's spit booze made by chewing rice into a pulp and spewing it into a cup and letting it ferment. Symbolically it's seen as half of the person who creates it. But it's Taki who travels with Mitsuha's grandmother and sister in Mitsuha's body to make the offering at the sacred relic of the miyamizu, the musubi shrine which resides on top of a mountain, and according to their grandmother, the netherworld. In order to return from there, a person must leave behind what is most important to them, and in this case, the kuchi kamizaki is used. The music swells. Musubi is a local deity, it's name means union. Tying strings together is a union, connecting to people is a union, and the flow of time is a union. These are all parts of musubi's power. The miyamizu braided cords are tied to that, a skill from god, they represent time itself. They assemble and take shape, twist and tangle, unravel now and then, break and reconnect. That's what a union is, what time is. When something becomes a part of a person, it joins their soul, the offering is used to connect the kami with the people. On the way back down the mountain, Taki is thrust from Mitsuha's body, and he awakes in tears. This is where i'm gonna mark spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie check it out and come back, or get spoiled, do you? In the beginning i mentioned a feeling, have you ever felt like something was missing? Like there's a hole in your gut, like you're hungry but you don't know what it is you need to fill that hole. I honestly feel that way a lot, i think a lot of people do. Usually i try to fill it with a video game, or maybe buying something off amazon. I would say some people use drugs, others food, or sex, you name it. But the gnawing emptiness always comes back doesn't it? The feeling of missing something. When Taki wakes up, he and Mitsuha never swap again. That night Mitsuha watches the comet streak across the sky like in the beginning. Taki's texts to her stop going through, his phone calls don't work, and he has no idea how to find Mitsuha. All he has is a sketch he made of her town. Finally giving in, he sets out to find her, only to find out that Itomori was destroyed by a fragment of the comet that passed 3 years ago. Mitsuha and everybody else he knew from the town were dead and had been dead for 3 years. All the while, every trace of Mitsuha begins to fade from Taki's memory as he races up the mountain to Musubi's shrine. At the summit he descends into the crater valley and into the shrine where he partakes of the kuchikamizaki he brought there in Mitsuha's body 3 years prior. So not only were Taki and Mitsuha's souls transcending space, but they were transcending time as well, going back and forth 3 years each switch. When Taki left the kuchikamizaki in the shrine, it was his soul leaving his most important possession, half of Mitsuha. By returning to that shrine and drinking it, he's taking his offering back, and he transcends into the realm of the divine, the nether realm, seeing Mitsuha's entire life play out before him, before landing in her body on the day of the meteor strike. Meanwhile, Mitsuha finds herself in the future again, trapped in Taki's body alone at the shrine. It's only after leaving and seeing the town, which is now an extension of what was once a lake, does she realize she's dead. Back in the past, Taki scrambles to get an evacuation together, but hits a roadblock with Mitsuha's estranged father. In a last ditch effort he goes to find Mitsuha in the mountain shrine. Occupying the same place at different times, bound by their braided souls, the two can only hear echoes of each other's voices. That is, until twilight creeps in. It's explained earlier by a teacher that in japanese, the word twilight, or tasukare doki, comes from the root word tasukare, meaning who is that. It's a time where it's neither light nor dark, and the divine world of the kami and the world of humans intertwine. Meeting face to face during this magic hour, Taki gives Mitsuha her braid back, the one that was given to him three years prior by a girl he didn't know at the time. As the hour ends, Taki takes out a marker and recommends they write each other's names down so they don't forget when they wake up. He writes on Mitsuha's palm, she makes one horizontal stroke and vanishes. While Mitsuha races to finish the evacuation of the town, both her and Taki begin to forget who it was they were acting for. On Mitsuha's hand is only written suki da, meaning i like or i love you. Although she wasn't able to finish, Mitsuha's name in hiragana, or the phonetic japanese lettering system, starts with a downstroke. Suki da begins with a horizontal one. There's a frenetic stress to the last quarter of the film as the two race against the clock and expectation in order to save the town from a catastrophe that had already happened in Taki's timeline. After their parting on top of the mountain, Taki and Mitsuha forget each other's names but not the feeling of missing something, a desire to fill an emptiness inside them. That there was something important they have to find, something they cared about very much, but they just can't remember what it was. Without going into it directly, the movie does end happily, but still on a cliffhanger like you would expect from a Miyazaki type film. Mitsuha managed to rescue the town, all she had to do was give up her most treasured possessions, her memories of Taki. The same thing Taki did by writing i love you instead of his name on her palm. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the two parted with the memories of each other, their most prized possessions, and made their way back from the netherrealm on top of that mountain by the musubi shrine. However, the most important message is what we're left with afterwards. Nature, time, fate, and ties. I grew up in the woods, mostly. For a time i even lived in the mountains. Most people think massachusetts and immediately think boston, but boston has always been hours away from me. Geographically miniscule compared to most cities, and especially so considering the rest of new england as a whole. For the majority of the areas i've lived in out here, time more or less stands still. When i was in the mountains it was even more so. I have a connection to this land my ancestors ran into by accident and never left. The farther away from modernization, the more free and magical the wilderness can be. Out here you're never more than a stone's throw away from a farm, or a sugar shack, or hell, even a moose. It's one of the oldest parts of the country and has more or less stayed that way. I'm always torn, a sense of adventure drives me to leave, but there's a reason you always know when someone is from new england. It's a hosh environment, but something sick inside us loves it. It's quaint, uncomplicated, and boring, but it's beautiful. It's a union. As we work through our lives there are always inexplicable things that drag us this way and that. The more we get involved, the more strings are added to our braids and the stronger they become. Your name focuses on the idea of love, but there's many different kinds of love and many forces out there that are just as compelling. I've never been one to buy into spiritualism, but i do think it's funny how the less complicated people's lives are, the happier they seem to be. Usually people with uncomplicated lives live in harmony with nature, surrounded by people they're very close with. Perhaps this emptiness we feel so often inside us is a longing for nature, or a loneliness we've created in our lives by disconnecting with it. I don't necessarily know about the kami, but it's hard to deny that there is a spirit and beauty in unspoiled land, clean rivers, fresh snow, green hills. I often wonder how it was that the small intricacies in my life brought me to exactly where i am right now, a million miles away from where the me of the past expected to be. How inexplicable ties pulled me towards people i never would have expected to meet or know, and how it changed the course i thought i was on. So next time you feel that pit in your stomach, maybe think about why it plagues you instead of trying to fill it with something else. Remember, the umbilical was nothing but a cord as well. Do you think it's a coincidence that this gnawing sensation comes from the origin of our first tie to this world? Let me know in the comments. If you have more movies that you'd like to see us cover specifically let us know in the comments below along with your thoughts about what i was talking about earlier in the video. So check out our links in the description for thepixelempire.com slash bonsai pop. Our lucky patron of the week is Alec Howse. Bro, thank you. Seriously, patreon has been a lifesaver this month. If you like this kind of content this is what we do, so subscribe to bonsai pop, hit the bell so you get notified when we put out new videos. Anyway guys, my name is mike, this is bonsai pop, make sure you follow us on twitter and instagram down below that is at bonsai underscore pop on both of those. We have at least one more video coming out for you before january 1st. I'm very excited to see you there and until next time thanks