Latest news with #Ghibli-related
Japan Today
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
The Ghibli Golden Route: Japan's most accessible destinations for fans and first-time visitors
By Laura Payne Since the 1980s, Studio Ghibli has produced globally acclaimed films. These movies have captivated both children and adults because while the studio's animated worlds are full of whimsy and adventure, they are also not afraid to feature universal themes and realities such as romance, grief, war and coming of age. In June 2025, the studio will commemorate its 40th anniversary. Fans traveling in Japan will find no shortage of ways to mark this occasion as the country is full of Ghibli-related destinations. Among these, some of the most famous are situated along the Tokyo-Kyoto-Osaka 'Golden Route' — an itinerary recommended for first-time visitors in Japan due to features such as convenient access. The Ghibli Golden Route — like Ghibli movies themselves — invites visitors to find beauty in everyday items, explore fantasy worlds and reflect on real-life tragedies. From museums to movie settings, here are some key highlights of the Ghibli Golden Route. Tokyo: Ghibli Museum and real-life inspirations Besides its gorgeous main building, the Ghibli Museum is known for its themed cafe, special exhibitions and screenings of original Ghibli short films. Image: MARODG/Pixta With international flights arriving at Haneda and Narita airports daily, Tokyo is where many Golden Route travelers begin their journey. After arriving, local trains and buses can bring travelers to the first Ghibli Golden Route destination: the Ghibli Museum. Rather than passively consuming curated displays, this museum designed by director Hayao Miyazaki encourages visitors to create their own unique experience by freely exploring a building that looks like a Ghibli setting. Many exhibits at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum feel like something from a Ghibli movie because they come from the same time period as certain films' settings. Image: Ryozo/Pixta The Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum is another Ghibli-related site that lies about 50 minutes away from the Ghibli Museum via public transportation. The architectural museum is home to more than two dozen historic buildings — used by Ghibli animators as references when creating movies such as 'Spirited Away' (2001) Studio Ghibli's connection to the architectural museum is also clearly seen in the institution's caterpillar mascot, Edomaru, who was created by Hayao Miyazaki. Visitors who become fans of this little-known Ghibli character should stop by the museum gift shop as it carries souvenirs featuring Edomaru. Besides the museum and other memorials, Yokoamicho Park features a children's play area. Image: mandegan/Pixta While the Ghibli Museum and the architectural museum evoke wonder, other sites in Tokyo are powerful reminders of harsher incidents depicted in Ghibli movies. Yokoamicho Park, for example, is home to the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum. In 1923, this earthquake and subsequent fires became one of Japan's deadliest disasters, claiming thousands of lives. Studio Ghibli portrayed this earthquake in the 2013 film 'The Wind Rises.' Inside the memorial museum, visitors can view photos and artifacts from the disaster's aftermath. The surrounding Yokoamicho Park is home to even more memorial structures for victims of the earthquake and the Great Tokyo Air Raid of 1945. Air raids have been depicted in multiple Ghibli films such as 'The Boy and the Heron' (2023), 'Grave of the Fireflies' (1988) and even the fantasy film 'Howl's Moving Castle' (2004). Scenes like these are just one way Ghibli has sparked reflection on conflict's consequences. Nagoya: Explore Ghibli Park and Showa-era attractions The Toromon Gate stands between Ghibli's Grand Warehouse and Dondoko Forest — two of five areas inside Ghibli Park. Image: kunami/Pixta Although not traditionally part of the Golden Route, Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture is an easy addition since it is accessible from Tokyo via shinkansen (bullet train). Nagoya is also an essential destination for Ghibli fans as it serves as the gateway to Ghibli Park. Located inside Moricoro Park (Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park), Ghibli Park is a place that brings the studio's best-known and lesser-known films to life. In the park's five areas, visitors can enter iconic scenes and settings from their favorite movies such as the bakery from 'Kiki's Delivery Service' (1989) or the antique shop from 'Whisper of the Heart' (1995). Some small rides such as a carousel are available, but like Tokyo's Ghibli Museum, most of the fun at Ghibli Park comes from exploration and discovery. Ghibli Park is accessible in about one hour by train from Nagoya station. Spending at least one day exploring the park is recommended, though visitors who hope to enjoy every detail of all five areas may need two days. Another smaller attraction that Ghibli fans in Nagoya should consider visiting is the Showa Era Lifestyle Museum. Ghibli films such as 'My Neighbor Totoro' (1988) and 'Only Yesterday' (1991) take place during Japan's Showa Era (1926 - 1989), and this museum exhibits thousands of everyday items from this period such as cars, toys and advertising signage. Hiroshima: Ghibli inspiration and wartime reflection Hayao Miyazaki is just one famous figure who has traveled to Tomonoura in the town's long history. Other notable visitors include actor Hugh Jackman and the samurai Ryoma Sakamoto. Image: まちゃー/Pixta Take a bullet train to Fukuyama station, and from here a local bus whisks visitors to Tomonoura — one of the most historic port towns in Hiroshima Prefecture. Hayao Miyazaki is known to have stayed in Tomonoura for about two months, and it is believed that his time here inspired the setting of the movie 'Ponyo' (2008). Stop by the Tomonoura Tourist Information Center upon arriving, and you can find information about places in town with ties to the movie. Besides Ponyo-related sites, Ghibli fans should also stop by Onfunayado Iroha — a restaurant and ryokan (traditional-style inn) that was renovated using sketches by Miyazaki. Tomonoura's long history also means that there are countless other local wonders to explore that are not related to Ghibli. Even if travelers cannot stay for as long as Miyazaki did, the sights and stories of Tomonoura are sure to stir the imagination. Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park was built near the hypocenter of the atomic bombing that destroyed the city on Aug. 6, 1945. Image: denkei/Pixta The final recommended stops on the Ghibli Golden Route are in Hiroshima City — about 20 minutes away from Fukuyama station by bullet train. Although they do not have direct connections to Ghibli films, travelers should visit Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park and museum. Ghibli directors Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were children during World War II, and both directors have explicitly portrayed the destruction caused by war in their movies. The year 2025 will be the 80th since atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the anniversaries of these tragedies and the peace advocate Studio Ghibli coincide, perhaps now is one of the best times to remember the studio's real-world commentary. Beyond the Ghibli Golden Route Japan's most famous and accessible Ghibli-related sites are found along the Golden Route, but there are many more inspirations to explore. After traversing the Golden Route, countless other new worlds await. © Japan Today
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why the White House Started Making Deportation Cartoons
Our story opens on March 25 — mere weeks ago, yet somehow already fading into the fog of our eternal present — with OpenAI releasing a new version of ChatGPT. Compared with previous versions, this one was surprisingly good at generating novel digital images: Users could tell it what they wanted to see, and voilà, an image would appear. And what lots of people wanted to see, it transpired, was real photographs transformed to look like stills from the animated films of the Japanese company Studio Ghibli. These beloved movies — especially those directed by Hayao Miyazaki — evoke the wonder and innocence of childhood but also the forces that erode that innocence: mortality, history, greed, hubris. They are products of a labor-intensive and largely by-hand animation process; nothing else looks quite like them. It's not surprising that people were tickled by the prospect of near-instantly making anything look like a Ghibli movie, complete with that trademark aura of cozy but sophisticated wholesomeness. But ChatGPT's Ghiblification set what was surely a new speed record for the emergence of a meme format: Within 24 hours of the new release, generating Ghibli images had become the way for people to demonstrate their fluency in the internet's shifting codes. On the afternoon of the 25th, an engineer named Grant Slatton racked up tens of thousands of likes on X after posting a Ghiblified photograph of himself, his wife and their corgi on a beach. Soon people were posting not just family photos but images from the news and from history: a Ghiblified Donald Trump; a Ghiblified Jeffrey Epstein; Ghiblified jets smashing into Ghiblified twin towers; a Ghiblified murder of George Floyd. They started Ghiblifying old memes: Ghiblified 'distracted boyfriend,' Ghiblified 'Bernie Sanders at Trump's inauguration,' Ghiblified 'Ben Affleck mournfully smoking a cigarette.' Refreshing social media, you could watch in real time as internet culture rummaged around its cobwebbed pantry, tossing everything into its new game. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, claimed that a million new ChatGPT users signed up in a single hour on March 31 and that the Ghibli-related demands were 'melting' the company's graphic processors. Haters like me felt obligated to point out that this Ghiblification seemed likely to rely on ChatGPT's having been fed Ghibli movies as training, with no permission sought or compensation offered. (All OpenAI has said on the subject is that the new model was trained on 'images reflecting a vast variety of image styles.') These movies are painstakingly constructed stories about the irreducibility of the human spirit and the fragile beauty of nature. The Ghiblified images are something else, something that wouldn't be out of place in a Miyazaki movie: a swarm of cheap knockoffs feeding parasitically off the essence of the originals, cranked out by a technology so plunderously energy-intensive that coal plants slated for closure have been kept open just to keep it running. But pointing this out risked sounding like a killjoy: They were just memes, right? By March 27, the meme had reached the White House, or at least its official X account, where a news release about the planned deportation of a Dominican woman — a convicted fentanyl dealer — was paired with a Ghiblified image of this woman weeping in shackles. Historically, a meme's presence in the feeds of politicians or large companies has been a reliable sign that it's going stale. President Trump, however, has ushered in a new relationship between politics and internet culture. For at least a decade, his feeds, and those of people in his orbit, have often felt like portals connected straight to the online sewers where toxic new memes evolve. (The very sewers where, after March 25, people quickly started sharing Ghiblified Hitlers and Ghiblified antisemitic caricatures.) Trump and his social media people, like any content creators seeking on-ramps to maximum virality, have been willing to post or repost just about anything: anti-Clinton memes from white-nationalist message boards, a reworked wrestling clip of Trump body-slamming 'CNN,' assorted QAnon dog whistles. The subjects are varied, but the memes all share a single message: Look what we're unafraid to do! In recent months, this piece of the Trump presidency — its content strategy, as it were — has taken an especially dark turn. Trump was re-elected thanks in part to his promise to lead a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. But the promised wave of mass deportations hasn't yet materialized; indeed, while arrests and detentions have increased this year over Joe Biden's last year in office, deportations have lagged behind last year's and are far below Barack Obama's numbers. In the absence of an increase in actual deportations, the administration seems to have pursued an increase in deportation spectacles: images celebrating people's expulsion from the country with a visceral glee expressed in the native idioms of internet culture. There was the video, posted to the White House X account, of deportees' being shackled and loaded onto planes — and jokingly labeled deportation 'ASMR.' There was the deportation clip soundtracked by Semisonic's 'Closing Time.' There was the image of Trump waving from a McDonald's takeout window, placed memeishly above a Homeland Security announcement in such a way that the president seemed to be giving a cheery goodbye to the deported Brown University professor Rasha Alawieh. Perhaps most striking, there was the video of Kristie Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, speaking in front of an El Salvadoran prison cell crammed full of shaved inmates, warning immigrants that they, too, could be sent there. In thumbnail form, this video resembled nothing so much as the elaborate viral contests posted by the likes of Mr. Beast (see 'I Survived 50 Hours in a Maximum-Security Prison' or '100 Identical Twins Fight for $250,000'). Not long ago, the United States government would, by default, seek to distance itself from images like this; often, as with images of post-9/11 torture, the government actively suppressed or destroyed them. The Trump administration releases them on purpose, implicitly arguing that their content is a source of pride and amusement. (If the Abu Ghraib photos leaked today, it's possible to imagine that the White House would repost them approvingly.) It drops any sugarcoating or performance of restraint and gives us crass gloating, assigning Trump the role of the merciless, enthusiastic deporter in chief — no matter what the actual numbers look like. On April 6, the White House posted another Ghiblified meme, this one pairing a cartoon JD Vance with a quotation from him about refusing to let the 'far left' influence deportation policy. This administration isn't the only one trying to play the latest meme game. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a leading figure of the global far right (and a big A.I. fan), posted a Ghiblified self-portrait; Sam Altman reposted it. The Israeli Army, which has used A.I. to plan its strikes on Gaza, posted Ghiblified images of its personnel; the Israeli Embassy in India posted Ghiblified images of Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu together. Just as A.I.-powered Ghiblification is an easy way to give any image you want a sought-after vibe, political memes are a way to cultivate a defiantly jubilant online mood with no fixed relationship to reality. Or at least they're a way to try. Would Trump be able to meme his way through tumbling markets, spiking costs or goods shortages? We may find out. As the White House's deputy communications director, Kaelan Dorr, said on X, responding to criticisms of the Ghiblified deportation image: 'The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.'
