The story of Border 1939, the great lost Studio… | Little White Lies

The sto­ry of Bor­der 1939, the great lost Stu­dio Ghi­b­li film

07 Jun 2020

A male character with dark eyes and a red cap, wearing a dark jacket against a bright red background.
A male character with dark eyes and a red cap, wearing a dark jacket against a bright red background.
Isao Takahata’s unre­alised pas­sion project was intend­ed as a fol­low-up to Grave of the Fireflies.

On 17 April 1989, a year and a day after the release of his wartime mas­ter­piece Grave of the Fire­flies, Isao Taka­ha­ta pub­lished an out­line of his next project at Stu­dio Ghi­b­li. Where­as Fire­flies depict­ed, in grim detail, how World War Two had end­ed for the Japan­ese, Bor­der 1939 would show how it had begun: with Impe­r­i­al Japan’s bru­tal inva­sion of con­ti­nen­tal Asia. By broach­ing a sen­si­tive sub­ject that ani­ma­tion had broad­ly avoid­ed up to that point, the film would have bro­ken new ground – had it been realised.

Taka­ha­ta opens his out­line with a syn­op­sis. The set­ting is 1939, Japan­ese-occu­pied Seoul. Akio, a Japan­ese uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent, learns that his friend Nobuhiko, who was said to have died in an acci­dent while at a mil­i­tary acad­e­my in Manchuria, is still alive. Vow­ing to find him, Akio trav­els to Manchuria, which is also ruled by the Japan­ese. There, he dis­cov­ers that Nobuhiko abscond­ed to join the anti-Japan­ese resis­tance. To his great sur­prise, he learns that Nobuhiko, although raised by a Japan­ese fam­i­ly, is eth­ni­cal­ly Mon­gol and iden­ti­fies with the native peo­ples of the region.

Akio’s inves­ti­ga­tions are noticed by the Japan­ese police, who arrest and tor­ture him. Resis­tance fight­ers free him and take him in, but they remain sus­pi­cious of him due to his Japan­ese blood. To prove his loy­al­ty, Akio decides to help one of their mem­bers. The beau­ti­ful Akiko, anoth­er Mon­gol, is in per­il, so Akio escorts her to her home­land. Cue a dra­mat­ic horse­back flight across the Mon­go­lian steppe. By day, the pair evade police and ban­dits by dis­guis­ing them­selves; by night, they sleep in yurts under star­ry skies. By the time they reach their des­ti­na­tion, they have grown so close that it hurts to say goodbye.

With the sweep of a David Lean epic, Bor­der 1939 imme­di­ate­ly stands apart from Takahata’s oth­er works, which rarely go big on action and plot. Akio’s courage and roman­tic streak mark him out as more clas­si­cal­ly hero­ic than the director’s usu­al pro­tag­o­nists. The can­vas – Korea, Chi­na, Mon­go­lia – is more vast than any­thing else the direc­tor attempt­ed. But as his out­line makes clear, he intend­ed the film as more than just a slice of his­tor­i­cal derring-do.

Taka­ha­ta con­tin­ues by describ­ing three ambi­tions for the film. First: to reclaim the real world as an excit­ing set­ting for adven­ture sto­ries in ani­mé, as opposed to the imag­i­nary realms of sci-fi. Sec­ond: to teach young Japan­ese view­ers about their country’s inglo­ri­ous his­to­ry, lest mil­i­tarism should ever appeal to them again. Third: to have them think about how they con­struct their sense of iden­ti­ty, both per­son­al and national.

Pre­sent­ed in these terms, Bor­der 1939 starts to look like vin­tage Taka­ha­ta. Escapism, spec­ta­cle for its own sake, nev­er real­ly had a place in his work, and espe­cial­ly not by this point in his career. On the con­trary, his great­est films strive to redi­rect our atten­tion back to our­selves. In their messi­ness and nuance, the sit­u­a­tions and rela­tion­ships he depicts mir­ror those in our lives, our soci­ety. The mis­takes and injus­tices com­mit­ted by his char­ac­ters are sig­nif­i­cant, because they point to what we can improve in our world.

Bor­der 1939 took aim at one of the great­est injus­tices in Japan’s his­to­ry. Its exper­i­ment with empire had left a lega­cy of bit­ter resent­ment across Asia (while also lead­ing the coun­try into a cat­a­stroph­ic war with the Allies). And yet, by the 1980s, Japan­ese soci­ety remained very con­flict­ed in its ways of inter­pret­ing this dark chap­ter in its past. Many open­ly con­demned their country’s crimes, but many more did not, and Taka­ha­ta wor­ried that the younger gen­er­a­tions were grow­ing up igno­rant of their history.

Hence the need for this film. Its sto­ry was based on the nov­el The Bor­der’ by Shin Shika­ta, who had him­self lived as a Japan­ese boy in occu­pied Korea. Shika­ta spent years in bliss­ful igno­rance of the colo­nial régime’s bru­tal­i­ty, but as a teenag­er he became sen­si­tised to it – and to the fierce resis­tance move­ments it stirred up. His real­i­sa­tion plunged him into painful self-reflec­tion. What does it mean to feel alle­giance to a nation? And what hap­pens when that nation does wrong?

These are the ques­tions Taka­ha­ta want­ed to ask. Peo­ple start devel­op­ing a sense of self once they come into con­tact with oth­ers,” he writes. If your coun­try is invad­ed by anoth­er, which then tries to repress your cul­ture, your sense of nation­hood becomes stronger. But what if we take the invader’s per­spec­tive? I won­der whether, by tack­ling the com­plex iden­ti­ty issues on the con­ti­nent and Kore­an penin­su­la at the time, we can get view­ers to start think­ing about the inter­na­tion­al­ist spir­it that is now need­ed among the Japanese.”

Taka­ha­ta had already attempt­ed a cri­tique of Japan­ese nation­al­ism in Fire­flies. Although the film is set dur­ing the Amer­i­can fire­bomb­ing of Japan at the war’s end, it also alludes to the ugly jin­go­ism that set Japan on the warpath in the first place. But it does this sub­tly – maybe too sub­tly – and most view­ers remem­ber only the char­ac­ters’ suf­fer­ing, lead­ing some to accuse Taka­ha­ta of com­mem­o­rat­ing Japan­ese vic­tim­hood while skat­ing over Japan­ese atroc­i­ties. Per­haps he con­ceived Bor­der 1939 as a response to this criticism.

We’ll prob­a­bly nev­er know. In June 1989, the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment vicious­ly sup­pressed polit­i­cal protests on Beijing’s Tianan­men Square. Pub­lic opin­ion in Japan, as else­where, turned against Chi­na, and Ghibli’s dis­trib­u­tor deemed that a film part­ly set there was too risky. Bor­der 1939 was axed before enter­ing pro­duc­tion. Aside from Takahata’s out­line (reprint­ed in his book Eiga o tsukuri­na­gara kan­gae­ta koto’ [Thoughts while Mak­ing Movies]), no mate­ri­als from the project have been released. I’ve seen no devel­op­ment art­work. Ghi­b­li declined to com­ment for this article.

In the end, a film about Asian anger over Japan­ese vio­lence was derailed by Japan­ese anger over Chi­nese vio­lence. The irony won’t have been lost on Taka­ha­ta, who con­tin­ued to cam­paign for inter­na­tion­al peace and coop­er­a­tion until his death in 2018. In these decades, his activism pro­vid­ed an out­let for this mes­sage. After the col­lapse of Bor­der 1939, he went on to make four more exquis­ite fea­tures at Ghi­b­li, start­ing with 1991’s Only Yes­ter­day. But nev­er again did his films con­front the fraught mat­ters of geopolitics.

NB: The above image is a detail from the cov­er of the sec­ond vol­ume of Shin Shikata’s The Bor­der’. It was not pro­duced by Stu­dio Ghibli.

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