Since when has the entire world (or at least that portion called Japan) hung on every word spoken by Hayao Miyazaki? I mean, I respect him and his work as much as the next guy, but every week I see yet another article reacting to some opinion voiced by the seasoned animator.

This week’s lesson is nostalgia. Miyazaki no like.

Some of his films are set in the near or distant past, while others are set in storybook-style fantasy worlds filled with cozy, antique trappings. So it is natural that the topic of nostalgia would come up when the director agreed to take questions at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

Miyazaki said he has pondered “which period [of Japan's history] was best…to find out where we should have stopped. And I realized it was not possible to stop. For example, there are people who feel nostalgia about the 30s of the Showa era.”

The Showa era (1926-1989) took in most of the 20th century, but the Showa 30s (1955-1964) have become cherished in popular culture as the end of the postwar era, when Tokyo Tower and the first Shinkansen were built, the nation hosted its first Olympics, and hard-working families strove to obtain the “three sacred treasures” of a television, refrigerator and washing machine.

Miyazaki, 67, remembers the time firsthand. “People have the delusion that things were good in those days. But actually, the fact was that it was a very unhappy period,” he said.

“There was much frustration at that time, and there was a violent impact that people created on the nature of Japan, such as in the seas and in the rivers and in our mountains. Much rubbish was piled upon the environment by us…I recall in my boyhood, friends around me who. were not able to attend school or eat properly,” he recalled.