From Up the Poppy Hill: A Miyazaki Masterpiece

The ghosts of our pasts always haunt us, but sometimes, they lead us to identify who we really are, and who we'll be from then on.

I have always been an avid fan of Hayao Miyazaki's movies and apart from my favorite Whisper of the Heart, From Up the Poppy Hill is the second best love story I adore. The story revolves around a young girl Umi Matsuzaki, who would always raise signal flags for his father who had died in a supply ship during the Korean war. Little did she know that a certain someone was answering her signal flags, and even that someone even wrote a poem about her raising the flags in memory of her father. 

Meet Shun Kazama, the young boy who immediately but secretly falls in love with Umi. He is one of the editors of the weekly newspaper in their school and is part of the Journalism club. The basic conflict surfaces when their school principal and the chairman decide to abolish the Club building, which includes the Archeaology, Philosophy, Chemistry and other clubs mostly led by the boys of the Konan Academy. Umi, who befriends the handsome Shun, suggests that they should clean the place to make it look new. 

The work began and the love story of the two develops until a second conflict arises--when Shun and the other boys were invited for a small get together party at Umi's boarding house, Umi shows her a photo of his late father Yuichiro Sawamura and he is left speechless. He has the same photo and his foster father finally told him that Yuichiro is his true father, which makes the couple brothers and sisters. Shun gets cold towards Umi until he admits that they are indeed brother and sister. 

"It's just like a typical melodrama." Shun says.

However Umi admits that even though they are related, her feelings for him will never change. The same goes for Shun and they bade each other goodbye after they have talked to the chairman to come visit their new club building.

Umi's mother comes home from America and she asks her the truth about Shun. The mother then contacts Shun's foster father and they are both able to come in touch with the third person in the photo--the one who knows the truth. It becomes a moment of peace for all three of them--Captain Hiroshi Tachibana, Shun and Umi. It feels like a reunion for Hiroshi seeing the son and daughter of his late friends and he thanked them for the moment they finally met. 

I was moved by the last scene where Hiroshi held both their hands and thanked them for the opportunity to meet his best friends in a long time. I also loved how the movie depicted the Japanese culture of boarding houses, signal flags, school clubs, stencils that worked before xerox machines and passionate students who would save their club building no matter what. 

It was indeed a ghost of Shun and Umi's past that actually brought them together in the end.