Makoto Shinkai Retrospective: The Place Promised in Our Early Days
I always have this feeling… The feeling that I’m losing something — Sayuri Sawatari
Makoto Shinkai’s third anime production (after She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star) was 2004's ambitious full-length ninety-minute movie The Place Promised in Our Early Days, this time made at CoMix Wave Inc. with a full production team rather by himself on his home computer. As director, producer and writer, Shinkai maintained tight control on his vision, and the resulting movie only further deepens his recurrent themes of teenage alienation, romantic separation, painful longing and of course sustains his singular focus on beautiful landscapes with strikingly colourful skies.
Unlike Voices of a Distant Star which focused on the interiority of only two characters, Place Promised features three protagonists who interact with multiple other human beings, broadening the story from introspective monologue-driven yearning to relationship drama and even alternate-history war spectacle. Although set in Aomori, the most northerly prefecture of Japan’s largest island Honshu, this world is not our own. At some point during the Cold War, the Russian “Union” annexed Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, separating families split across the Tsugaru Strait. Now decades later, Japan is split between the US-allied South and and the Union-occupied North (now renamed “Ezo” as it was called by the indigenous Ainu tribes before Japan claimed it for their own). International relations between the islands are tense, and the Union have built a mysterious, enormous thin white tower in Ezo that rises miles into the sky and can even be (improbably) seen from Tokyo, hundreds of miles away.
In this world, the Seikan Tunnel (an undersea rail tunnel than joins Honshu and Hokkaido, not unlike the UK/French Channel Tunnel) was never built, and there is no communication or travel between North and South Japan. The Aomori countryside is littered with abandoned remnants of the incomplete Hokkaido Shinkansen railway line, and it is in one of its derelict buildings that much of the plot transpires. This plot is split into three distinct chapters.
In the first chapter, Hiroki Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa are middle-school friends with a shared passion for aviation. Together they work in their spare time at a local munitions factory to raise money to purchase materials for a bespoke aircraft they’re building from scratch in one of the disused railway buildings. Hiroki in particular is obsessed with flying across the Tsugaru Strait, risking an international incident, to see the Ezo Tower up close. Their mutual female friend, the frail but upbeat Sayuri Sawatari becomes involved in their hobby, naming their craft the “Velaciela” (white wings), and Hiroki promises to one day fly Sayuri with him to the Tower.
Unfortunately, during the summer they were due to complete the Velaciela, Sayuri and her family disappear. Hiroki and Takuya lose their enthusiasm for the project and their friendship crumbles, leaving the aircraft unfinished. This leads to the second chapter, where Hiroki moves to Tokyo to study while Takuya joins a local military research programme, investigating the nature of the Ezo Tower and its link to parallel world theories.
Hiroki becomes lost and disconnected, and begins dreaming of Sayuri who he eventually realises is somehow all alone in an empty alternate universe. We learn that the Tower is based on the theories of Sayuri’s physicist grandfather, and her mental state is somehow connected to whether the Tower activates or not. Sayuri is trapped in a coma, her mind untethered to this reality, wandering through surreal dreamscapes in parallel worlds empty of life. If she awakens, the land around the tower will be replaced by matter from a parallel world, and the entire Earth is at risk of being overwritten.
The third chapter chronicles Hiroki and Takuya’s fraught reunion years after their separation, and their attempt to not only save Sayori but to reach and destroy the tower as war erupts around them. Yeah, what starts as a bucolic and nostalgic tale of childhood friendship takes quite a turn into quantum mechanics-steeped technobabble, weird science and alternate world war history. It’s narratively… weird.
In terms of literary comparisons, the closest SF work to this is probably Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle. Although Amazon expanded greatly on the premise with their recent multi-season TV adaptation, the original, slim novel has an odd, melancholic and offbeat tone not dissimilar to Place Promised. It’s about normal people navigating a world where history has gone “wrong” and they’re faced with the truth of other worlds (not necessarily our own) where history progressed differently. Dick’s drug-addled mysticism is replaced here by woolly half-formed pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, meaning this leans more into fantasy than sci-fi, with vague talk of quantum tunnelling and parallel worlds that might as well be about fairy circles and magic portals.
The world-threatening Ezo Tower is little but a plot device, a distant, magical edifice, impossibly large and inadequately explained. It’s going to replace the world with a black void if Sayuri wakes up? Why? Why would someone build such a thing? These questions are pointless. Shinkai’s focus is on style, mood, and the very narrow spectrum of emotions that concern him. Sayuri is trapped in an empty otherwordly place yearning for Hiroki, and Hiroki is empty, trapped in a world without Sayuri, yearning for her. With his one meaningful male friendship destroyed by Sayuri’s disappearance, he is alienated from the world.
Takuya throws himself into research, and even almost develops a relationship with an older female colleague, but he’s similarly damaged and seeks danger by joining a paramilitary organisation. Neither Hiroki or Takuya make healthy choices, and only upon briefly reuniting to save Sayuri do they begin to feel “real” again.
Sometimes the movie itself is oblique and spartan to the point where it’s difficult to tell why things are happening, so focused is Shinkai upon depicting beautiful sunset landscapes, lens flare and vivid colour. Hiroki gives us an almost constant internal monologue heavy on emotion (or at least emotional confusion) but light on exposition. It can make the plot progression leaden, uninvolving, and at times baffling. I first watched this movie with my wife back in around 2007, not long after the UK DVD was released. I recall we were both so bored by it that we fell asleep before the end, only wakening with the credits. I had no idea what the movie had been about, and felt little motivation to rewatch it.
With time, and exposure to Shinkai’s later works, I find myself drawn back to it again, to see where it sits amongst his oeuvre. Watching during daytime, with a definite goal to “see it to the end” definitely helped. I didn’t fall asleep this time, and I can appreciate what Shinkai was going for here. His works always seem to focus on some kind of loss — in this case it’s the loss of adolescent friendship, goals and ideals. Although there is something of a romantic component to the plot, due to Sayuri’s disappearance, she’s unable to develop much of a meaningful relationship with either male lead, and in the end she becomes something of a plot macguffin herself. Really this is a movie about two young men who grow apart, in part because a girl comes between them.
As I did with Shinkai’s previous shorts, I read the accompanying novel, this time written by Arata Kanoh, who also wrote the second novelisation of Voices of a Distant Star. While I intensely disliked that book, I’m happy to report that Kanoh’s Place Promised novel is excellent. It’s extremely faithful to the movie, but expands particularly on Hiroki’s actions and relationships, fleshing him out much more as a character, really getting into the depths of his alienation. The book is structured like the film, and the middle chapter where Hiroki studies in Tokyo is particularly strong. He develops an unusual, mutually supportive/destructive relationship with a fellow student (Rika) who barely only cameos in the film. Their relationship provides a fantastic distillation of Shinkai’s theme of emotional numbness following loss, and is quietly heartbreaking.
The book also clarifies Sayuri’s lost, multidimensional state and ties it closer to Hiroki’s story. In some ways I almost think Place Promised works better as a novel, though of course it misses Shinkai’s beautiful backgrounds. Unfortunately the novel can’t clear up any of my scientific concerns about the Tower, or the repeated quantum nonsense, although it half-heartedly attempts to explain how the Tower could be tall enough to see from hundreds of miles away (spoiler — it fails miserably).
Sayuri’s quote that I started with — I always have this feeling… The feeling that I’m losing something — hits harder in the novel, as we have more time and more context with which to process what it is that she eventually has to sacrifice. Kanoh also takes us further on past the end of the movie, to show what happens to Hiroki and Sayuri in the following years. It’s a very bittersweet ending that does change the nature of the story a little, but is very much in keeping with Shinkai’s later works (especially 5 Centimeters Per Second). It left me feeling kind of empty but thoughtful, and in the end, sadly accepting. I think there’s a significant skill (plus wisdom, and cruelty) in writing an ending that evokes such mixed, complex feelings.
Yen Press published the novel in English only a little over two years ago, in a lovely hardback. I definitely recommend seeking it out, the translation reads extremely smoothly and I enjoyed it a lot. For scholars of Japanese literature, it makes multiple allusions to works by Kenji Miyazawa (Night on the Galactic Railroad). I really must get around to reading some of his stuff.
Interestingly, the anime movie Giovanni’s Island also heavily references Miyazawa’s work, and has thematic similarities to Place Promised. It’s set in 1946 as the Russians annexe the formally Japanese Kuril Islands and repatriate the population. The southernmost Greater Kuril Chain Island, Kunashir, is only 16km to the east of Hokkaido. It’s perhaps not that much of a stretch to imagine another timeline where Russia could have also claimed Hokkaido as their own.
Much like Shinkai’s other works, in 2006 Place Promised also received a manga adaptation that ran in Kodansha’s Monthly Afternoon. Unfortunately it ended incomplete after eight chapters, enough for only a single volume, drawn by Mizu Sahara who also drew the Voices of a Distant Star manga. Sahara is perhaps slightly better known as Sumomo Yumeka, author of yaoi manga Same Cell Organism and The Day I Became a Butterfly. The Place Promised manga, perhaps because of its incomplete nature, has never been officially translated into English. There is a fan scanlation, but some chapters read like they’ve been run through particularly poor machine translation software. They’re almost incomprehensible and I can’t possibly recommend reading them.
Place Promised is a divisive work. For some viewers its undeniable aesthetic beauty, melancholic tone and focus on difficult emotions may be enough, but for others it’s ponderous and illogical. I sit somewhere in the middle. I’m glad I revisited it to give it another chance not to sedate me to the point of unconsciousness, but I don’t think it’s one of Shinkai’s strongest. As part of a retrospective of his career it’s essential, as it continues to develop and cement his signature obsessions, but I doubt I’ll ever return to it in future.
The Place Promised in Our Early Days
Directed, produced and written by: Makoto Shinkai
Music by: Tenmon
Studio: CoMix Wave Inc.
JP cinematic release: 20th November 2004
UK DVD release: 18th Oct 2006 (ADV Films), 21st Nov 2016 (Anime Limited)
Languages: Japanese audio with English subtitles, English dub
Runtime: 90 minutes
BBFC rating: 12
The Place Promised in Our Early Days (novel)
Written by: Arata Kanoh
Original story by: Makoto Shinkai
English Translation by: Taylor Engel
JP Publisher: Enterbrain (26th Dec 2005)
English publisher: Yen press (24th Nov 2020)
ISBN: 978–1–9753–1869–7
The Place Promised in Our Early Days (manga)
Written by: Makoto Shinkai
Art by: Mizu Sahara
JP Publisher: Kodansha
Magazine: Monthly Afternoon
Original run: Feb 2006 — Aug 2006
