In the entrance hall of Tokyo’s Yushukan war museum, a temple to Japanese revisionism, the first thing you notice is the dark green livery of the legendary Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter aircraft, in its day the world’s most advanced carrier-based fighter. More manoeuvrable than the British Spitfire and with an astonishingly long range, it greatly aided Japan’s war effort before the Allies developed the technology and tactics to beat it. Deployed in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, three years later, when Japan’s defeat had become inevitable, the Zero was being sent out on desperate kamikaze missions.
The aircraft has become an icon for Japan’s small – but vocal – ultra-rightwingers, the scowling types who man the sinister black vans that circle Japanese cities barking xenophobic slogans and harking back to the imperial “glory days”. For these men, who bemoan Japan’s postwar loss of dignity as a US “client state”, the aircraft is an exquisite evocation of engineering prowess and fighting spirit in an era before the Americans had stripped the emperor of his divine status.
It is something of a surprise, then, that Hayao Miyazaki, the world-renowned director of children’s animated films with pacifist, even socialist, leanings, should have chosen to make his latest film about the Zero. Mr Miyazaki’s films, including the delicately beautiful My Neighbour Totoro and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, enthral with their depiction of wide-eyed childhood and the hidden Shinto world of wood spirits and river gods. Flight and machinery – in all its Heath Robinson-hissing wonder – figure prominently, and The Wind Rises , which came out in Japan last month, is a tribute to what Mr Miyazaki calls “the extraordinary genius” of the Zero’s designer Jiro Horikoshi.