13 5 Centimeters per Second Quotes in Japanese and English, Explained

This is an extremely 5 Centimeters per Second-like piece of narration.

But if I had to reduce the entire sentence to ordinary language, I think it would be:

“I’m cold, I’m hungry, and I’m lonely.”

Putting it that way almost seems to destroy the whole point of the monologue.

But cold and hunger really do inflict extraordinary damage on the human mind. They are among the most fundamental physical sensations we have.

If you want to avoid being swallowed by strange thoughts, keeping yourself warm and eating whenever possible are surprisingly important.

Takaki should have brought hand warmers and sandwiches.

Better still, he could have carried a thermos of hot tea.

If he had done all that, perhaps this wonderfully literary monologue would never have been born.

The useful English word here is insecure.

It can mean unstable, uncertain, or anxious. “I feel insecure” means that you feel uncertain or uneasy. If you want to specify what you are anxious about, you can use insecure about….

The dub says:

“The unfamiliar snowy wasteland outside the train. The wait time crawled along. Painful hunger, I felt. Slowly it made me feel more helpless.”

At least in terms of describing Takaki’s physical state, I think painful hunger is rather more accurate than stomachache.

If we translated what Takaki is really thinking into ordinary human language, it would probably be:

“Please, please still be waiting for me at the station.”

Because if Akari had actually gone home, the result would have been catastrophic.

The fact that she waited was enormously fortunate, and Takaki obviously wanted her to wait.

This kind of sideways, deliberately literary way of expressing an emotion is one of the defining features of 5 Centimeters per Second.

But there is something worth remembering here.

Expressing what you actually feel directly and honestly is extremely important.

There may be no literary beauty in it. It may not sound elegant at all.

But it contains something more important:

the truth.

Over the course of a long life, I suspect that accumulating these small truths matters more than accumulating literary beauty.

Although having absolutely no ability to sound literary would perhaps be another problem entirely.

The notable English expression is I wish.

According to the grammar most of us learned at school, I wish + past tense / past perfect is often used for situations that are unreal, unlikely, or contrary to reality.

If we turn that around, the English wording almost reveals Takaki’s hidden confidence that Akari probably is still waiting.

And that is probably exactly right.

It is a surprisingly effective way of expressing his emotional contradiction.

The dub says:

“Please, please just, it’d be better if you just went home.”

Considering that this is an internal monologue, I personally prefer the subtitle version.

If I translated this one into ordinary language, it might become:

“Oh no. We are way too emotionally overwhelmed right now. What are we supposed to do after this?”

Takaki had just completed an unnecessarily long journey through freezing weather, while Akari had spent hours waiting at the station.

For both of them, the wait must have felt almost infinite.

Then they finally meet.

The reunion is so unnecessarily dramatic that their emotions are almost forced to reach an impossible height.

Perhaps ordinary everyday life afterward was no longer something they could even imagine.

And honestly, if they had simply begun sharing a quiet, ordinary daily routine after that, perhaps it would have seemed so normal that they eventually became bored.

Romance is probably better when it begins quietly and grows inside everyday life.

Still…

What a wonderful monologue.

This is pure 5 Centimeters per Second.

The interesting English verb here is hang; hung is its past tense.

Hang over can describe something looming above or exerting an oppressive presence.

So the future is presented almost like an enormous object suspended above the two of them.

The dub says:

“Our lives, not yet fully realized, the vast expanse of them. They lay before us and there was nothing we could do.”

This is another wonderfully meaningful-sounding monologue.

But if we actually reached this state in real life, the words running through our heads would probably be closer to:

“Haaaah… ahhh… haaaaah…”

In other words: endless sighing.

Most of us would not suddenly formulate the exquisitely polished sentence, “Sorrow gathers around me.”

Seen from the opposite direction, however, this tells us how dangerous Takaki’s situation has become.

He is barely able to take a new step forward and quit his company.

I genuinely think that was the right decision.

Had he remained in that state much longer, it would not have been surprising if he had eventually become physically or mentally ill.

And since he apparently possessed enough ability to become an independent freelancer afterward, perhaps quitting the company became a blessing in disguise.

The woman who exchanged a thousand emails with him may have let a rather large fish escape.

The subtitle itself contains nothing especially difficult.

The dub uses:

“As I went about my life, bits of sadness had piled up here and there, on the washed sheets, on the toothbrush by the sink, on the cell-phone’s call history.”

Go about one’s daily life means to continue or carry on with one’s ordinary everyday activities.

Pile up means to accumulate or form a growing pile.

Drag by means for time to pass painfully or tediously slowly.

Creep over someone can describe a feeling such as fear gradually coming over a person.

The dub says:

“Each and every minute felt dreadfully long. Time clearly had evil intentions. Above me, it slowly flowed away.”

The dub says:

“And right then I felt like I finally understood where everything was. Eternity, the heart, soul.”

It feels like… is a useful expression meaning that something seems or feels a certain way.

Misgiving means a feeling of doubt, anxiety, or concern.

Dissipate means to scatter, disappear, or gradually fade away.

The dub says:

“But then all my worries, my doubt started melting away. All that was left were Akari’s soft lips on mine.”

Obsess means for something to dominate or occupy a person’s thoughts.

The passive expression be obsessed with… means that you cannot stop thinking about something.

The dub gives a fuller version:

“For the last few years, I wanted to move ahead. I was reaching for something I couldn’t have. But I didn’t even know what I was reaching for, couldn’t figure out where those kinds of thoughts came from, why they were threatening me like that. So, I just kept on working. It was hard and I could feel my mind losing its edge day after day.”

The dub says:

“One morning, I realized I’d lost all the ambition I had. Whatever kept me going was now completely gone. I knew I’d reached my limit. So I quit my job.”

This is the line from Akari that opens 5 Centimeters per Second.

It gives the film its title, and the third episode itself is also titled “5 Centimeters per Second.”

Even without thinking particularly deeply about it, it is an extraordinarily beautiful title.

But why is the film called 5 Centimeters per Second?

One clue may lie in the third episode and in Kanae Sumida’s reference to five kilometers per hour in the second episode, “Cosmonaut.”

That speed refers to the freight vehicle carrying a rocket component: an enormous machine moving forward at something close to walking speed.

The final episode, meanwhile, follows Takaki through an empty and unfulfilling adult life until he finally manages to take a new step forward.

The common idea is movement.

Perhaps “five centimeters per second” is the speed of the invisible progress made by people who keep trying to live, no matter how painfully slow that progress may seem.

Takaki’s eventual ability to leave his company and build a life as a freelancer demonstrates the importance of continuing to take those tiny steps.

If we look at 5 Centimeters per Second only as a romance, it can feel thoroughly depressing.

But we should not forget the adult Takaki who has managed to stand on his own feet.

I think that version of him is much closer to the real point of the film.

I discuss this interpretation in more detail here:

5 Centimeters per Second Is Neither Depressing Nor Terrible: A Radically Positive Interpretation

This article reinterprets Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second,...

The English subtitle sounds almost deliberately stiff.

But then again, “five centimeters per second” is itself an oddly technical phrase.

We have been seduced by the beauty of the film into believing that the phrase is inherently poetic. Taken completely out of context, it is actually rather mechanical.

Another useful word is petal, meaning one individual part of a flower’s corolla.

A related word is corolla, meaning the complete collection of petals forming the flower’s crown.

Japanese readers may recognize the word from the Toyota Corolla. The car’s name ultimately comes from this botanical term.

Akari says this immediately after describing the speed at which cherry blossom petals fall.

Within the first episode, the line connects directly to the snow at the end of the story.

The final reunion takes place in brutally cold weather and under extremely difficult circumstances.

And yet, for Takaki and Akari, even the snow that should have been freezing them becomes something special and strangely warm.

To put it simply:

What you are looking at matters less than who you are looking at it with.

Snow also appears very prominently in the final episode.

Adult Takaki is in an extremely painful emotional state, so the winter cold represented by the snow only intensifies his loneliness.

If the right person had been beside him, the same physical world might have looked completely different.

But Risa Mizuno, his girlfriend at the time, apparently could not become that person for him.

The world seen alone and the world seen with someone else can therefore be completely different, even when the physical objects before our eyes have not changed at all.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the English expression here.

Kanae has finally resolved to confess her feelings to Takaki.

But just before she can do so, she seems to understand that those feelings will never be returned, and she suddenly begins to cry.

I cannot say that this particular monologue is one of my deepest personal favorites.

What always gets me is the timing of the rocket launch immediately afterward.

It is simply too perfect.

At this moment, Takaki must surely have realized, “Oh. This girl really does like me.”

And because the rocket launches at exactly that point, I cannot stop myself from seeing it as a visual representation of Takaki’s suddenly ecstatic ego.

Every time I watch it, part of me thinks:

“Ah. He has achieved liftoff.”

I do understand that this is not what the scene is supposed to mean.

The rocket is obviously representing the emotional state of two people reaching desperately toward something impossibly distant—or perhaps the distant object of longing itself.

It is not supposed to symbolize Takaki’s ridiculous inner celebration.

But once I saw it that way, I could never completely erase the association.

This is probably not the most respectable way to watch the scene.

Makoto Shinkai, I apologize.

The Japanese article originally had a different subtitle line attached to this quote—the line immediately before this monologue—so I have given the quoted Japanese a direct English rendering here rather than presenting that mismatched line as its translation.

Strictly speaking, this is not dialogue spoken aloud by Risa Mizuno.

It appears as a message she sent to Takaki, which he then reads as part of his narration.

And, well…

Honestly, that is terrifying.

If a relationship is already visibly approaching its end and then you receive a poetic breakup message like this, that is terrifying.

My completely unsupported theory is that this was not the only poetic email Risa ever sent him.

Perhaps she had always written like this.

Maybe Takaki was regularly receiving ten-thousand-character messages throughout their relationship.

This brings us to a slightly different question.

I think there are two basic ways of watching 5 Centimeters per Second.

One is to assume that we are watching the events in chronological order exactly as they happened.

The other is to interpret much of the film as Takaki remembering his own life.

Most viewers probably begin with the first interpretation.

For me, however, it has gradually become the second.

And if we understand the film as Takaki’s recollection, then perhaps all those exquisitely literary monologues scattered throughout 5 Centimeters per Second were partly influenced by Risa Mizuno.

No matter what form a relationship takes, people inevitably continue living while carrying pieces of other people inside them.

Takaki may occasionally have found Risa’s writing exhausting while they were together.

But after becoming an independent freelancer, perhaps those messages eventually became rather good memories.

That, too, is one of the strengths human beings possess.

There is nothing especially unusual in the subtitle.

The dub says:

“Even after exchanging 1000 text messages, our hearts only got 1 centimeter closer to each other.”