Character · The Wind Rises
Jiro Horikoshi
A boy too short-sighted to fly builds the aeroplanes instead, and the film refuses to make that simple.
In Otakana the clue reads: Nearsighted boy who dreams of designing planes
- Type
- Character
- Series
- The Wind Rises
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
The Wind Rises follows Jiro Horikoshi, a real engineer, from a childhood of aviation dreams to the drawing boards at Mitsubishi in the 1930s. His eyesight rules out flying, so he designs, and the dream sequences hand him an imaginary mentor in Giovanni Caproni, the Italian aircraft builder, who tells him that aeroplanes are beautiful and cursed in the same breath.
What he designs becomes the Zero, the fighter Japan flew across the Pacific. Miyazaki puts the whole contradiction on screen and then leaves it sitting there. The machines Jiro loves are made of the same metal as the war Miyazaki hates, and the picture drew complaints at home and abroad for being both too soft on the period and too hard on it.
It is also a love story, with Naoko, and a very quiet one. The 1923 earthquake sequence is the technical high point, animated as a low groan crossing the ground while the frame buckles under it. Miyazaki announced his retirement when the film released in 2013, which lasted roughly as long as his retirements usually do.
Spelling JIRO
JIRO is four letters and the Japanese is 二郎, with a long O that a faithful romanisation writes as JIROU or with a bar over the vowel. Neither fits the row. The name means second son and is one of the plainest given names in Japan. Once the J appears the answer is close to forced, since almost nothing else here starts that way.