Studio Ghibli’s From Up on Poppy Hill (Official Studio Ghibli Website) is a 2011 animated feature directed by Gorō Miyazaki, with a screenplay co-written by his father, Hayao Miyazaki. Released on July 16, 2011, it marked their first collaboration as director and screenwriter.
I remember going to see it during its original theatrical run without expecting very much. By the time I left the cinema, I was thinking, “That was something good.”
Here, I discuss the story and some highlights of From Up on Poppy Hill. Please note: the synopsis covers the whole plot, so if you dislike spoilers, read only partway and watch the film first.
*This is a translated version. The original (Japanese) is available here.
- Detailed Synopsis and Character Map
Umi and Shun fall for one another, then discover they may be siblings. A reunion with someone who knows their parents’ past reveals Shun’s true parentage. Below are a detailed synopsis, a character map, and an analysis of the story. - The Making-of Documentary: The Two of Them
The production of From Up on Poppy Hill was documented in The Two of Them, which explores the tensions between Hayao and Gorō Miyazaki. I consider how that relationship connects with the film’s themes. - The Signal Flags: Facing the Past, Living in the Present
Umi continues to raise the flags, but what they mean changes. I examine an ending that seems to leave an earlier promise unresolved while giving it a different kind of fulfillment. - A Possible Requiem for Yasuyoshi Tokuma
Chairman Tokumaru was modeled on Yasuyoshi Tokuma, who helped establish Studio Ghibli. I suggest that this connection may also help explain the film’s Kanagawa setting.
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From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) Synopsis: Love, Legacy, and the Latin Quarter
Quick Summary: The Core Conflict
The main points of From Up on Poppy Hill are as follows:
- Umi Matsuzaki
The protagonist is a second-year high school student who manages a boarding house called Coquelicot Manor. - Her Father’s Death and Her Mother’s Studies Abroad
Umi’s father has died, and her mother is studying in the United States. - The Campaign to Save the Latin Quarter
A campaign against the demolition of the school’s clubhouse brings Umi into contact with Shun Kazama. - Shun’s Secret
Shun is not related by blood to the parents who raised him. They have told him his father was Sawamura, an old navy friend. - An Unwelcome Discovery
Sawamura is also Umi’s late father. Just as they are growing close, they face the possibility that they are siblings. - The Truth About Shun’s Father
They try to set their feelings aside. Later, Onodera, another of Sawamura’s navy friends, confirms that Shun is actually Tachibana’s son.
Character Map: The Tangled Web of Coquelicot Manor
A Story of Lives Carried Through War
If I were to sum up From Up on Poppy Hill, I would call it “a hard-won love.” Beneath the romance is the recognition that these young people inherited lives protected through the turmoil of war. Watching them move toward a future of their own feels like an answer to the hopes of the generation that came before them.
Gorō Miyazaki directed the film, and Hayao Miyazaki co-wrote its screenplay. I see a connection between its concern with inheritance and the father-son relationship explored in the production documentary. That is my reading of the film, rather than a settled account of the filmmakers’ intentions.
With that in mind, here is the story of From Up on Poppy Hill.
Detailed Synopsis: A Scene-by-Scene Breakdown
The Fateful Encounter at the Latin Quarter
In Yokohama in 1963, Umi Matsuzaki is a second-year high school student managing Coquelicot Manor. She prepares breakfast for its residents, raises her signal flags, and sets off for school.
Meanwhile, the boy she is about to meet is traveling to school by boat.
During lunch at Konan Academy, a boy dives from the roof into a small water tank as a protest against the demolition of the Latin Quarter clubhouse.
Umi, who has watched him land safely, walks over to him.
She helps him out of the water, and the sight seems to become a symbol of the campaign. The Latin Quarter houses the school’s clubrooms, but its age has led the school to plan its demolition. The students who use it oppose that plan.
After school, Umi accompanies her younger sister to the Latin Quarter. Impressed by the boy’s jump, her sister wants his autograph. They find him in the journalism club.
His name is Shun Kazama. He is preparing a mimeograph stencil for the next issue of the newspaper, but his injured hand makes the work difficult. Umi’s sister gets her autograph and goes off with Shirō Mizunuma to tour the building. Umi stays to help.
She picks up the work quickly and heads home afterward. When she starts dinner, she discovers she is short of ingredients. On her way to shop, she meets Shun by chance, and he offers her a ride on his bicycle.
After shopping, she shares the croquettes Shun has bought—a useful way for a hungry young man to tide himself over before the boat ride home.
For both of them, this seems to have been a special day in otherwise busy but familiar lives.
The Devastating Sibling Crisis
The women at Coquelicot Manor arrange a dinner party and invite the boys, including members of the journalism club. The gathering also provides an opportunity to discuss the school board and the future of the Latin Quarter.
During the party, Umi shows Shun her favorite photograph of her late father with two friends from his navy days. When she names him as Yūichirō Sawamura, Shun is shocked.
At home that night, Shun looks at his copy of the same photograph. The men are Sawamura, Hiroshi Tachibana, and Yoshio Onodera. Shun’s adoptive father, Akio Kazama, has told him how Sawamura once arrived with a baby. The Kazamas, who had lost their own infant, took the child in and raised him. They had not concealed his adoption and believed Sawamura was his biological father.
Shun is left to absorb the possibility that the girl he is beginning to love is his sister.
The next day, the students begin cleaning the Latin Quarter. Their plan is to show that the old building remains a beautiful place of cultural value, then persuade the chairman to preserve it. Umi joins in, but Shun seems to be avoiding her.
Unhappy with his behavior, Umi confronts him. Shun tells her why he has been keeping his distance.
Umi is bewildered. Faced with what they believe to be a blood relationship, they can only try to remain as they were: close friends.
The Final Revelation and a Race Against Time
As the cleanup nears completion, Umi, Shun, and Mizunuma go to Tokyo to plead directly with the chairman. They have no appointment, but after waiting patiently, they are given a little of his time.
They persuade him to inspect the cleaned-up building. Contrary to their expectations, he turns out to be a very amiable man.
On the way home, Mizunuma tactfully leaves Umi and Shun to return together.
They talk about their futures and other things, but eventually must part. Umi tells him that, even knowing they may be related, she still loves him. Shun replies that he loves her, too.
The film often expresses its characters’ feelings through deceptively simple lines like these. For a closer look at the original dialogue, see my collection of From Up on Poppy Hill quotes in Japanese and English, with translation notes and scene analysis.
When Umi gets home, she recognizes her mother’s shoes: her mother has returned temporarily from America. The family is delighted, but Umi has something she needs to ask.
Her mother gently explains that, while she was pregnant with Umi, Sawamura brought home a baby. He was the son of Hiroshi Tachibana. The baby’s mother had died in childbirth, Tachibana had died in a maritime accident, and relatives could not take him in because of the atomic bombing. Sawamura took the child in and registered him as his own. A good man!
Umi still has doubts. What if Shun really is her father’s son? Her mother replies that she would like to meet him and asks whether he resembles the photograph. What a response. Understanding what has happened in her absence, she embraces Umi, who can finally cry in her arms.
The next day, Umi goes to school feeling lighter. There is important business ahead: the chairman is coming to inspect the Latin Quarter.
The students’ work has restored the old building’s beauty and given them a convincing case for its preservation.
During the visit, Shun receives a call from his adoptive father. Umi’s mother has contacted him about the two teenagers’ predicament. Onodera, the other man in the photograph, is at the harbor and may know the truth, but the ship he captains is about to depart.
Meanwhile, Chairman Tokumaru promises to preserve the Latin Quarter. Perhaps he had already made up his mind when he met the three students.
Shun pulls Umi out of the building. As the others look on in confusion, Mizunuma announces that a major life event has arisen for the pair. The chairman laughs at their “escape” and welcomes this sign of youthful energy. Bravo!
Umi and Shun hurry to the harbor.
They reach Onodera just in time. He confirms that Shun is Tachibana’s son and says he would have done the same as Sawamura in his place. Meeting the children of his old friends moves him to tears.
With the truth known, a new future awaits them. What lives will these young people, whose very existence was protected amid such upheaval, lead? I can only wish them happiness.
That is the story of From Up on Poppy Hill. I often seem to have a drink in hand when I watch it, and by the end I am crying. How about you? Some may find it silly, but I love this film.
Now I turn to some of the questions and ideas raised by From Up on Poppy Hill.
From Up on Poppy Hill (2011): Analysis and Interpretation
The Making-of Documentary: Father and Son
I also recommend the NHK production documentary The Two of Them / Poppy Hill: A 300-Day War Between Father and Son (ふたり／コクリコ坂・父と子の300日戦争, in Japanese). Centered on the tensions between Gorō and Hayao Miyazaki, it is fascinating viewing.
From the start, Gorō refuses to show his storyboards to his father, while Hayao cannot stop worrying about the film’s progress. The distance between them is enough to make me anxious one moment and smile the next.
One of the documentary’s pleasures is that I like Gorō a little more after watching it. His struggle to complete the storyboards, and Hayao’s continuing attempts to pass something on, feel close to the concerns of the film itself.
I discuss that connection in more detail in the article below.
Read more: The Message of From Up on Poppy Hill: Insights from the Production Documentary
The Latin Quarter: Why Did They Have to Clean It?
The Latin Quarter is one of the places that stays with us in From Up on Poppy Hill. What a wonderful youth one might have had, belonging to a club in a building like that.
The students work hard to clean it so that it will not be replaced. But what does that effort mean within the film? My interpretation concerns how one generation passes something on to the next.
That reading may seem a little unexpected; I explain it more fully in the article below.
Read more: The Symbolic Meaning Behind Cleaning the Latin Quarter
The Signal Flags: An Apparently Unresolved Promise
One of the film’s moving moments is its final image of Umi raising the flags.
For Umi, raising the flags means remembering her deceased father. In that sense, the gesture ties her to the past. Watching her, her grandmother says:
“I wish you’d find a wonderful person, so you wouldn’t have to raise the flags anymore.”
Hearing those words, we might think, “Right, Umi will meet someone and stop raising the flags.” Yet she never stops, and the film deliberately closes on that same act.
The important point is that, although her outward action is unchanged, its meaning has changed.
At the beginning, Umi raises the flags for her father, drawn toward the past. At the end, she also raises them for Shun—for someone living in the present.
Her grandmother’s wish is not fulfilled in the expected way. Instead, we are moved by Umi’s ability to live in the present.
Why Kanagawa? A Possible Connection to Yasuyoshi Tokuma
The film is explicitly set in Yokohama, Kanagawa, whereas the manga leaves its location less definite.
Why Yokohama?
There may be several reasons, but I think one could be Yasuyoshi Tokuma, founder of Tokuma Shoten and a key figure in the establishment of Studio Ghibli. He died in 2000.
Tokuma was a formidable man who also became chairman of his former school, Zushi Kaisei Junior and Senior High School in Kanagawa, during the 1980s. Chairman Tokumaru is modeled on him, as the Friday Roadshow account explains in the tweet below.
#徳丸財団 の実業家・ #徳丸理事長 にはモデルがいます。それが、#徳間書店 を創業し、#スタジオジブリ の初代社長でもあった #徳間康快 さん。声を担当した #香川照之🗣さんは徳間社長の追悼映像🎞を見て徳丸理事長のしゃべり方を研究したそうです🧐#金曜ロードSHOW#コクリコ坂から pic.twitter.com/l5XDJb7eN8
— アンク＠金曜ロードショー公式 (@kinro_ntv) August 21, 2020
The businessman Chairman Tokumaru of the Tokumaru Foundation (徳丸財団) is based on a real person: Mr. Yasuyoshi Tokuma (徳間康快), the founder of Tokuma Shoten (徳間書店) and the first president of Studio Ghibli. The voice actor, Teruyuki Kagawa (香川照之), reportedly studied Chairman Tokumaru’s unique way of speaking by carefully watching a memorial video of President Tokuma.
Perhaps the chairman whom Umi, Shun, and Mizunuma meet in Tokyo reflects how Hayao Miyazaki saw Tokuma. Although Gorō directed From Up on Poppy Hill, Hayao co-wrote its screenplay. I wonder whether the film might also be a requiem for Tokuma, and whether that connection helped determine its Kanagawa setting. My own guess is that choosing Yokohama rather than Zushi avoided making the connection too obvious.
Whatever the truth of that interpretation, I would like to become the sort of adult Chairman Tokumaru represents.
The images used in this article are from Studio Ghibli Works Still Images.
Can you name the movie before the scene comes into focus?
Put your visual memory to the test with a blurred Studio Ghibli scene.
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