What Weathering With You Gets Right About the Climate Crisis
Before everything turned really bad, in December of 2019 I went to my local theater and saw Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You. Undoubtedly, I had high expectations for it, especially since I watched his Your Name in early 2018 — after constantly hearing about how great it was — and I could honestly say that Weathering With You met my expectations. It was a much more grounded film than Your Name, with the supernatural elements being more understated when compared to the city of Tokyo, which was not as pure or romanticized as it was in Your Name. The city, instead, was shown in a more gritty way, with constant rainfall enveloping it. That isn’t to say that there were no supernatural elements, or that the elements didn’t play a substantial role in the story; in fact, the constant rain was caused by the presence of Hina — who was a sunshine girl. A sunshine girl, according to Japanese myth, is a once in a generation occurrence, whose presence results in endless rainfall for Japan. The only way for the rain to stop is by the sacrifice of the sunshine girl, which results in the main dilemma for Hina, her friend turned romantic interest Hodaka, and for her brother Nagi. Unstated throughout the course of the film, is the phenomenon of climate change, with the film offering an interesting take on the role of the individual in fixing it. Thus, the film can be seen as a teenage love story set during the climate crisis, and that could’ve been the reason why I never stopped thinking about it since the day I saw it.
Understandably, as an environmental scientist, there were some ways that the phenomenon was presented that I saw as problematic — and not attuned with the science. For instance, when the story of the sunshine girl is presented in the temple, the storyteller, when asked about the abnormal weather, tells that the endless rain is only abnormal because humans’ recorded history doesn’t go back far enough to account for past abnormal weather events. He also proceeds to note how the weather changes constantly, and that it doesn’t pay attention to what humans will find convenient or not. The latter is absolutely true, but the way that he describes weather seems to resemble, to me, the way scientists normally describe climate. And, the reason I say that is because he specifically talks about the abnormal weather occurring “in recorded history.” That seems to me that he’s talking about a longer term phenomena, and not simply a few days of rain. For anyone who doesn’t know, weather is the day to day shifts that we see and climate is the long term averages of those occurrences in an area. Hence, the reason why I think Shinkai is referring to climate change as the cause of the endless rain. In fact, I think he specifically mentions that in an interview here.
The reason why I think the film’s view about climate change is kind of problematic, then, is because humans are able to know, and have data for, past climate features that date back hundreds of thousand of years. Data of past climate features comes from ice cores that can be found near the poles. The reason why these cores can have pretty accurate measurements of past climate features is because, when snow falls and piles up on top of each other, it can compress into ice and form layers. From those layers, scientists are then able to measure ancient air concentrations because of trapped bubbles of air particles, precipitation, temperature, and other climate features. Hence, when the storyteller notes how humans’ recorded history doesn’t go back far enough, and that the abnormal amount of rain that Japan is experiencing during the course of the film is only abnormal because humans can’t measure past occurrences fairly accurately, it seems to resemble climate denialist arguments that speak about how the climate changes constantly, and that this instance can simply be a natural variation in Earth’s climate. And, that simply rubbed me the wrong way as I was watching the film.
As I was viewing the film, I couldn’t help but think that Shinkai was offering an argument that spoke about the naturalness of current climate change, when in reality, there’s substantial evidence that climate change now is largely caused by anthropogenic forces than natural forces like volcanic eruptions or the sun. The way that scientists know that is by tracing past changes in average temperatures of the Earth, which, when looked at from hundreds of thousands of years to now, shows that temperature increases now are happening at a tremendously faster rate than in past instances when temperatures rose. In fact, the climate is changing at a much faster rate now than ever before in the past 65 million years, and the only thing that accounts for that change is the vast amount of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels that have historically been emitted. And, because of those emissions, the world is prone to experience, with some parts already experiencing, extreme weather events such as increased prevalence of droughts, more intense hurricanes, and increases in frequency and/or intensity of heavy precipitation in certain areas. Which brings us back to Weathering With You, which, when one thinks about it, provides an analogy to climate change through the Japanese myth of the sunshine girl. And, even though that analogy leads to a film that talks about climate science in a way that makes me feel ambivalent towards it, certain aspects of the myth do present climate change in an interesting light, and Hina’s role to her world.
In a certain light, the film can speak on the emotional labor that women have to go through to make everyone around them feel better. In fact, Steph Watts, a writer and podcast producer, writes about that taxing labor more in depth on Girls on Tops. In that post, Steph Watts notes how Hina is not afforded the chance to be selfish, how she constantly has everyone’s interests in mind more so than hers. And, how the outside world, including Hodaka, sees her as someone who can bring joy to their own selves, and even save their world. It’s an entirely gendered job that Hina has, and as Watts notes, it’s part of an interaction that women are expected to do, especially from a young age, to offer happiness and comfort, and even more. Simply, through the myth, the sunshine girl has all the power to fix the abnormal weather, which means that Hina has that power. Even though every time she prays for sunshine the rain stops for a short period of time, if she wants to, the rain can stop for forever. The only thing that she has to do is sacrifice herself fully to the sky, to do an individual action that would save her world, and the people in it, but at the expense of her life and her physical body. A teenage girl is tasked with saving the world from a climate emergency — a teenage girl is tasked to give up everything in her life to save the world. She can’t afford to be selfish because, if she is, then the city she calls home is at risk of drowning. Hence, that gendered job gets interpreted through the climate crisis, and even provides parallels to our real world.
The present climate movement has, undoubtedly, become global because of teenage girls, as well as young queer people and BIPOC, demanding politicians and world leaders who, for so long, neglected climate science, to finally listen to it. From the back of the 2018 IPCC report that showed that 1.5 ℃ of warming was imminent and coming sooner than expected — there’s a good chance for average temperatures to reach that mark by 2030 — young people have demanded drastic and swift action to be taken to keep the world habitable. Activists such as Jaime Margolin, Greta Thurnberg, and Isra Hirsi, have committed to organizing people to act collectively, so that young people can easily engage in certain actions such as phone-banking for politicians committed to climate action, participating in protests and sit-ins, and engaging in strikes. The shear visibility of teenage girls, whether welcomed or not, who are on the frontlines of these movements, serves to unfortunately create the narrative (sadly from older white liberals) that generation Z girls will be the ones to change the world — narratives that are akin to ones that speak about how black women will save America and how indigenous people will save us from the climate crisis. Those narratives are unfortunate because they largely come from people who historically have been in positions of power (and have done little to address societal ills with that power) to allow themselves to lift up their hands and not worry about those ills. And by lifting up their hands, they transferred that responsibility to people who have historically been marginalized, and forced them to sacrifice everything to save everything around them. And, as I noted, that’s the case for Hina also — with everyone looking to Hina to provide them comfort, and then leaving her with an impossible choice at the expense of herself. Maybe that was the reason why, even though the science in the film wasn’t great, I still attached myself to it. Because Shinkai basically said that Hina doesn’t have to make that choice, that she is able to be selfish for one instance of her life, and that she can pray for herself also. Thus, all the Hinas of the world could also.
It might be selfish, but so is the prospect of depending upon a teenage girl to give up everything to save everyone. One individual, who has already been dealt with so much pain, should not have to give up the couple of things that made her truly happy — her brother and a good friend that turned into a truly real love for herself. I think that’s exactly the reason why I loved Weathering With You so much. Because it got that one thing about the climate crisis truly right: that one person is not supposed to save the world. A couple of kids should not have to give up on love to “fix” the climate crisis all by themselves. Even now, young adults should not feel guilty if they fall in love deeply, or for that instance, if they start a family. The false choice of having to sacrifice everything is just that: a false choice. And, no one should have to go through that as an individual.
