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The post-World War II years in the history of Modern Japan were vital in deciding the fate of the Japanese archipelago in terms of its ambitions of regaining what Emperor Hirohito of Japan in the ‘Jewel Voice Broadcast’ on 15 August 1945 called “the innateglory of the imperial state.” While there is a note of surrender in Hirohito’s speech, urging his subjects to march forward to a globalised and modern Japan by “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable,” attempts at modernising Japan, at an incredibly rapid pace, had already begun during the Meiji period in the nineteenth century. What Hirohito’s speech critically points to is the final, official reassertion of, as well as yielding to, the temperament and paraphernalia of modernity, an issue that was vastly in contention in the first half of the twentieth century. The issue of incorporating Western modernisation within Japanese society, as the Japanese sought to construct an identity for themselves after their devastating defeat in the war, had divided the country. Japan had already gone through a period of almost two hundred years of self-isolation from the world to its West, albeit with limited trade relations with the Dutch. The Meiji government, which came to power in 1868, attempted to incorporate Western modernisation within the folds of the state of Japan and thereby fill in the gap that had been created between a ‘traditional’ Japan and an industrialised, modernised West as a result of such isolation. In the nineteenth century, the government took it upon itself to invite various scholarly and military experts from the West to boost the Japanese project of modernisation. As Dani Cavallaro writes: “grand edifices in the West’s neoclassical style were erected, its vogues were superimposed onto traditional vestimentary codes, its cuisine was incorporated into the national diet, and its artistic techniques were taught in many schools, sometimes to the disadvantage of time-honoured indigenous methods” (7-8). Such an account of how the Meiji government attempted to modernise Japan by reorienting how the average Japanese built their homes, what clothes they wore or the food they ate, and how their children were being educated in schools alert us unambiguously to the condition of the ‘everyday’ that served as a platform for such transformations. Such transformations not only established themselves by altering the ‘everyday’, but also inscribed their legitimacy and normalcy upon it. As Henri Lefebvre states in his essay “The Everyday and Everydayness:” “A condition stipulated for the legibility of forms, ordained by means of functions, inscribed within structures, the everyday constitutes the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled consumerism is erected” (9).

This paper examines how Takahata Isao’s reputation as a filmmaker was established, focusing on the period between Horus: The Prince of the Sun (1968) and Only Yesterday (1991), using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of “field” and “consecration”. Through detailed analysis of promotion strategies, popular and critical reception of his films, and his appearance in different types of media in the form of essays and interviews, I will discuss how Takahata and his films were “consecrated”, or came to be recognized as something respectable and deserve critical attention. Throughout the analysis the focus will be on the relationship between different “fields” rather than his films. I will contend that the process of his consecration is deeply related to that of the establishment of the field of anime and its fandom in the late 1970s, and its relationship with other fields with greater cultural capital, such as literature and live-action films as well as non-Japanese animations. The association of Takahata and his films with these fields was used by media, stakeholders in film productions including Studio Ghibli and publishing houses Tokuma shoten and Shinchōsha, as well as Takahata himself, to distinguish him and his films from other anime.

[...]as this story and many others seem to imply, the supernatural is revealed as animal trickery, and clear distinctions between the species are preserved. Animals in oral and written literature have long served as objectified others on which to project the fears and desires of the human self, much as racial others have functioned in imperialist narratives.5 In contrast to the interracial power play that characterizes imperial and postcolonial literature, however, the relationships between humans and animals in folktales cannot address a combined audience of colonizer and colonized. Because they cannot write or talk back, animals enact the role of the other in a more extreme fashion than the colonized.

  The Tale of Princess Kaguya is, however, most notable for its extraordinary visuals. Viewers used to the bold lines and brash colours of Hayao Miyazaki's films - [Isao Takahata] also works under the Studio Ghibli banner - will be refreshed by the more painterly work in this gorgeous film, which maintains the dainty style he seemed to perfect in My Neighbours the Yamadas . The impression is of a continuous series of watercolours, similar to the narrative scroll revealed to Kaguya in a key scene.

  Grave of the Fireflies dallies in difficult, uncomfortable territory: the wretched last days of the second World War in Japan. We begin with a young boy named Seita dying of starvation some time after the surrender. A passerby roots through his meagre possessions and comes across a tin harbouring ashes. When he throws the contents away, the spirits of Seita and Setsuko, his sister, rise to lead us through the main body of the film. It is a grim tale. When their mother is killed in an air raid, they move in with an unsympathetic aunt and ultimately end up foraging for food in the unwelcoming wasteland.