Suwa, Obsidian and the Onbashira Festival
Watanabe, a professor at Atomi University who published a study of Ghibli's postwar history last year, starts from philosopher Takeshi Umehara, who connected Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Tezuka through his play Gilgamesh. In a published dialogue on the meaning of Jomon forest culture, Umehara turns to Suwa Taisha in Nagano Prefecture, which the essay calls one of Japan's oldest shrines, and to its Onbashira festival. Held once every seven years, the rite involves rebuilding the shrine's treasure hall, then selecting the great pillars, dragging them down from the mountains and raising them on the shrine grounds. The belief underneath it: when a tree grows old, a god takes up residence in a new tree and comes back to life.
Suwa, in southern Nagano Prefecture, has more going for it than mythology. It was a leading source of obsidian, the volcanic glass worked into stone tools, and prospered through the middle Jomon period. Suwa Taisha still issues the kajikimen, a dispensation that let the bearer eat venison without spiritual pollution during centuries when meat was taboo. Taro Okamoto, the artist who made the case in the 1950s for Jomon flame-style pottery as art, came to report on the Onbashira.
Then there is Eiichi Fujimori (藤森栄一, 1911 to 1973), a Suwa-born archaeologist who worked outside the academy. His excavations at the Idojiri site in the town of Fujimi led him to propose a Jomon agriculture thesis, arguing that people in the middle Jomon period were not only hunting and gathering but practicing a very early form of farming. Watanabe credits literary critic Naoya Fujita, whose 2025 book reads Ghibli's filmography through animism, with being the first to pull these threads into a single account. He quotes Fujita's conclusion that Suwa is the origin of the thinking that binds together the animist purity Miyazaki talks about, the squirming vitality of insects, and plain bloodiness.
Fujimi Town Runs Through Miyazaki's Filmography
Miyazaki's own tie to Fujimi is personal. He owns a mountain lodge in the town, a property that originally belonged to his father-in-law Kōshi Ōta (大田耕士, 1909 to 1998), an art educator known for the postwar printmaking education movement and the father of Miyazaki's wife Akemi. For years Miyazaki ran summer camps at the lodge, hosting Mamoru Oshii, Hideaki Anno and the children of friends. An episode from one of those summers became the seed of Spirited Away (2001). Ōta had also left shelves of Showa-era shojo manga in the building, and two of those volumes were the source books for Whisper of the Heart (1995) and From Up on Poppy Hill (2011).
Several Princess Mononoke character names come from Fujimi place names, including Eboshi, Kōroku and Okkoto. In The Wind Rises, the heroine Naoko Satomi is admitted to the Fujimi Kōgen Sanatorium. The part-time archaeology lecturer who is Satsuki and Mei's father in My Neighbor Totoro (1988) is modeled on Fujimori. Watanabe notes that Miyazaki drew heavily on Fujimori's book about the Jomon world, alongside Sasuke Nakao's study of the origins of cultivated plants and agriculture. The full argument, with maps, is laid out in Watanabe's essay for nippon.com.
Goro Miyazaki, Tokyo-2 and Shinkai's Hometown
Watanabe then finds the same geography in Ghibli's next generation. From around the mid-2000s the studio began handing features to younger directors, principally Hayao Miyazaki's eldest son Goro Miyazaki, now 59, and the former animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi, now 53. Goro studied forest engineering at the agriculture faculty of Shinshu University in Matsumoto (Shinshu is the old regional name for Nagano), and worked on park and urban greening plans as a landscape architect before Ghibli. He led the overall design of the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, which opened in 2001, and supervised the reconstruction of Satsuki and Mei's House at the 2005 Aichi Expo. He then directed Tales from Earthsea (2006), From Up on Poppy Hill, the TV series Ronja, the Robber's Daughter (2014) and Earwig and the Witch, released as a film in 2021. He also handled the landscaping for Ghibli Park, which opened in 2022 on the Expo 2005 commemorative park grounds.
Goro has said his father gave him exactly one instruction before university: four years of free time were coming, and he should keep that time genuinely free. University, as he put it, is a place where a certain kind of time exists, and Shinshu was a very good place to spend it.
Yonebayashi's connection runs through a single building. When Marnie Was There (2014) relocates Joan G. Robinson's English children's novel to a fictional Japanese town imagined from Hokkaido wetlands like the Kushiro Wetlands. The Marsh House where Marnie lives, though, is based on Suikyūsō, a villa built in 1931 in Karuizawa, also in Nagano, for the businessman Tsunekichi Asabuki and designed by William Merrell Vories.
The same prefecture turns up again in the post-Ghibli generation. In Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tokyo-2, the stopgap capital established after Second Impact destroyed Tokyo and the predecessor to the series' main setting of Tokyo-3, is located in Matsumoto. Ueda, which was considered as a model for Tokyo-2 in early planning, is better known as the setting of Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars (2009). Makoto Shinkai, 53, grew up in Koumi in the Minamisaku district, which borders both Ueda and the Suwa region. Watanabe points out that Japanese classics, Shinto and animism move to the front of Shinkai's work from Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011), the film that most openly pays homage to Miyazaki's worldview, and cites Fujita's book on Shinkai for the claim that Jomon-inflected themes surface in later work including Weathering with You (2019). Watanabe calls the whole thing a sketch rather than a finished thesis.
Looking Ahead
The essay also sets out Ghibli's split distribution policy, which matters directly to international fans. Ghibli runs no video streaming inside Japan at all, with the single exception of Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988), which sits with a different rights holder. Watanabe argues that policy is accelerating a drift away from Ghibli among younger Japanese viewers. Overseas, the catalogue moved onto subscription services in 2019, and he ties the sharp growth in Ghibli fandom abroad since then to that decision. The essay does not name the platforms.
The Boy and the Heron (2023), Miyazaki's first feature in a decade, became the first Japanese original film to top the US weekend box office chart, and won Best Animated Feature at the 96th Academy Awards in 2024, Miyazaki's second win in the category. Studio Ghibli took an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2024, with Goro attending. Watanabe adds that foreign visitors dominate the crowds at Ghibli's own facilities and at last year's Isao Takahata exhibition, which puts Goro's forestry training to unexpected use.
This piece is the second installment of a nippon.com series on Ghibli and postwar thought. Part one, on Miyazaki's animism and his unexpected link to Tezuka and Umehara, ran on September 29, 2026. nippon.com publishes in eight languages including English, though the English edition of this article was not live at the time of writing. Watanabe's own book on Ghibli's postwar history (Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2025) and Fujita's two studies have no announced English editions.