11 Weathering with You Quotes in Japanese and English, Explained

This is Hodaka’s monologue at the very beginning of Weathering with You.

The important part of the Japanese is kaete shimatta.

The ending shimatta gives his statement a suggestion of regret: they have changed something, and that change cannot simply be undone.

To me, several feelings drive this story beneath its surface: the instability of not yet being anyone, the frustration of adults stopping you from becoming someone, and the resignation that you cannot do anything after all.

What can break through those feelings is the sense of achievement in being able to say that you changed the world.

For Hodaka, saving Hina is part of that achievement.

Whatever the achievement happens to be, the fact that they have accomplished something matters to Hodaka and Hina.

Earlier in the story, they find that feeling through their sunshine business.

The fact that this very source of achievement brings about a tragedy makes the tragedy deeper still.

And the importance of having accomplished something is what eventually leads to Hodaka’s final assurance that they are going to be OK.

The English subtitle is otherwise fairly straightforward. The small Japanese ending carries more of the emotional ambiguity than the English wording makes explicit.

Hodaka has arrived in Tokyo with next to nothing.

Hina, working at a fast-food restaurant, secretly gives him a hamburger.

This is his monologue about that meal.

People feel lonely for all sorts of reasons, but perhaps the immediate cause of that loneliness is sometimes simply hunger.

Hodaka has run away from home and is alone in the enormous city of Tokyo.

Even so, if he had at least been able to keep his stomach full, perhaps things would not have felt quite so painful.

If we come across someone suffering from loneliness, perhaps we should offer them something to eat before attempting a hug, which does nothing to fill an empty stomach.

That alone might ease their loneliness.

I think food matters that much to us.

The phrase I’ve had is the present perfect: I have had.

It presents the meal as the best in his life up to the point from which he is speaking.

If the comparison were explicitly anchored to an earlier point in a past-tense narrative, I’d had—I had had—would be the past-perfect form.

Tense remains an enduring puzzle for many Japanese learners of English.

Hodaka says this in a monologue while watching fireworks with Hina on a rooftop, after she has brought clear weather for the fireworks festival.

I can certainly sympathize with his wonder at the weather.

Cloudy skies have their charms, as does the rain.

But after enough days of either, a brilliantly clear sky can make you feel, with some conviction, that we really are children of the sun.

Still, the heart of this monologue is surely the part about Hina moving his heart.

This is where Hodaka begins to recognize that she is the one affecting him.

Their dramatic experiences may have created something like the heightened attraction people associate with crossing a suspension bridge together.

But the whole thing began with the hamburger Hina gave him.

Perhaps feeding someone really is the surest way to win their heart.

The English expression to notice is move.

It can describe physical movement, but move someone can also mean to affect someone emotionally.

In the passive, I was really moved by… means that something touched you deeply.

The subtitle as transcribed in the source article reads The way sky looks.

In ordinary English prose, this would be The way the sky looks.

The excerpt above follows the Japanese article’s transcription.

This monologue comes when the children, fleeing the police, finally find a room in a love hotel and can catch their breath.

A love hotel rents rooms to couples for short stays; here it becomes a temporary refuge.

I think the line neatly expresses what Hodaka and Hina want in Weathering with You.

Their story is a flight from adults who insist on involving themselves in their lives.

To put it unkindly, this is a childish wish. Yet the desire behind it is also something people need to experience as they grow up.

Because Hodaka is the protagonist and the story stays close to his feelings, the conventionally responsible adults around him appear inflexible, imposing their demands on children.

His father, though barely seen, was probably the clearest example.

Keisuke Suga might look like an exception.

My reading, however, is that the death of his wife has sent him into a kind of retreat into childhood, leaving him unable to live with his daughter.

I suspect that the Keisuke Hodaka meets at the end is living with her again, though that is an inference.

Yet growth is something we can achieve only through these conflicts.

Young people in every generation live with some kind of frustration and long for somewhere other than here.

Adults cannot simply ignore children, but they cannot involve themselves too much either.

What counts as the right amount of involvement?

What kind of conflict helps a child grow?

I doubt humanity has ever arrived at a final answer.

It is a thoroughly troublesome problem.

The expression to notice is I beg you: to beg is to plead earnestly.

Japanese learners may remember I beg your pardon? from school.

Literally, it asks for forgiveness, but it also asks someone to repeat what they have said, much as an apologetic expression can do in Japanese.

In everyday conversation, a simple Sorry? will often do the job.

Hodaka’s declaration could almost stand as sekaikei in a single line: a story in which an intimate relationship becomes directly entangled with the fate of the world.

But Weathering with You also questions the idea of stability itself.

Hodaka has to choose between Hina and stable weather, and the film invites us to ask what makes that stability so valuable.

When discussing weather and climate, we can tell a great big lie when we say something is “for the Earth.” More precisely, we should say “for an environment convenient for human beings.”

Hodaka sacrifices reasonably stable weather that suits humanity in order to rescue Hina.

Yet even in the changed environment that follows, people adapt to a new normal and carry on with their lives.

As I read the ending, hindsight makes the choice that felt so momentous to Hodaka and Hina seem far less decisive to the world around them.

That leaves Hodaka feeling unmoored when he returns to Tokyo.

It may seem to him that the seriousness of everything he felt has been dismissed as meaningless.

Hina, when they finally meet again, dispels that drifting feeling and gives him a decisive sense of self-affirmation.

That is what leads to his final conviction that they are going to be OK.

I found no especially unusual English expression to unpack here. The force of the line lies in the choice itself.

This is Hodaka’s monologue in the final scene, when he returns to Tokyo and meets Hina again.

On my first viewing, I could not quite grasp what was supposed to be so OK.

In the end, I think the idea is that they have accomplished something, and can therefore go on living by their own strength.

I explore this line in more detail in my analysis of the final scene.

Looking at the state of the world, you might reasonably feel that things are not OK at all.

Yet everyone is finding a way to live.

Perhaps Shinkai’s message, taking that whole situation together, is that whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, we are going to be OK.

The interesting English choice is we’re gonna be OK, rather than we are OK.

Written more formally, it is we are going to be OK.

The Japanese assurance carries a sense of continuing into the future, so the future-oriented English wording fits the scene especially well.

On the page alone, either version might seem possible; in this scene, I would give the advantage to we’re gonna be OK.

Police officers visit Hina’s apartment while looking for Hodaka. When they raise concerns about two children living on their own, this is her response.

For me, the situation behind this line brings one of modern society’s basic arrangements into focus: adults protect children thoroughly, while limiting the children’s freedom to make their own decisions.

I suspect that, in Japan and perhaps more widely in East Asia, this is connected to an affection for childhood itself.

We tend to see children as irresistibly endearing, as possessing something precious that we have lost, and as wonderful beings full of limitless possibility.

Put provocatively, society protects these beings from ill will by taking away some of their autonomy.

That is the contradiction I am pointing to when I describe protection as a deprivation of rights.

Restrictions on children’s work and on their ability to enter contracts independently make economic self-sufficiency difficult.

They end up having to live under the protection of the adults closest to them.

The restrictions have exceptions: Japanese law does not impose a blanket ban on all contracts or employment by minors.

I had a fairly happy childhood, so I never questioned this arrangement very much. Perhaps I should have.

Even so, I would still prefer it to a world in which children can be exploited for harsh labor or openly and legally stripped of everything they have.

The difficulty is that an individual child’s independence of mind and abilities can be overlooked completely.

I think that social inflexibility is what Weathering with You depicts in the circumstances surrounding Hina.

Hina, Nagi, and Hodaka might well have managed to live together successfully.

But if you came across two children forced to live on their own in the real world, you would probably feel the urge to intervene too, wouldn’t you?

Perhaps that is what being an adult means, however unwelcome the interference may be to the children.

I found no especially unusual English expression in this line.

Near the end of the film, Keisuke sees several police officers restraining Hodaka and shouts this at them.

From someone who had seemed to be drifting casually through life, it is a cry that comes from the heart.

The people he is shouting at could be described as adults who are just doing their jobs.

Looking back, I think Weathering with You gives us three main kinds of adults:

Keisuke is, of course, the adult who has not quite grown up.

The child-welfare staff and Takai, the younger detective, are absorbed in their jobs.

Yasui, the older detective, belongs to the final category, as does Keisuke by the end.

I do not think the Keisuke who drifts through much of the film could have shouted these words.

As he finally recovers himself toward the end, he acts with a child’s directness and at last says what he really feels.

After his wife’s death, he has, in my reading, retreated into childhood in an unhappy way.

Hodaka’s plea to see Hina one more time brings him back to a better kind of childhood: an openness that lets him recover and live as himself again.

As for the English expression, there is assholes. Well, it means what it means.

Keisuke has seemed adrift for much of Weathering with You.

When he says this, though, he looks wonderfully refreshed, as if something that had possessed him has finally left.

Perhaps he has at last returned to being an adult.

The line is full of an adult’s kindness.

Yet precisely because he has grown up, he can no longer say something with the sharp edge of his earlier outburst at the police.

He could simply acknowledge that Hodaka really did accomplish something.

But perhaps that is too much to ask.

At least he no longer offers the evasive remarks he made earlier about getting older and becoming unable to rearrange one’s priorities, or tells Hodaka to grow up.

Meeting Hodaka may have been a disaster for him in some respects.

Since it also helped him take a new step forward, however, it proved to be a wonderful encounter after all.

Apparently, saving someone’s life can turn out to be worthwhile.

The English subtitle makes a neat adjustment: the Japanese idea of the world being crazy “to begin with” becomes its having “always been” crazy.

It changes the phrasing while keeping the point.

The English dub may phrase it differently, but that is not established by the subtitle reproduced here.

This sort of rephrasing is a useful lesson in writing English: a simple expression can be the clearest way to get the meaning across.

Natsumi helps Hodaka after he escapes from the police station. She shouts these words as he runs along the railway tracks.

In front of Hodaka, still a child, Natsumi plays the grown-up.

But she is only a university student herself, busy telling enormous lies on job applications, as every job seeker supposedly does.

That is my rather uncharitable way of putting it.

To her, Hodaka’s wholehearted determination to save Hina must have looked beautiful.

I think the encouragement she shouts to him is also something she is saying to herself.

I doubt she went back to writing those enormous lies on her application forms afterward.

There is no particularly unusual English expression here. The directness is the point.

Near the end of the story, Nagi rushes in to help Hodaka and finally lets his real feelings show.

Throughout the film, his cool, knowing attitude has made his inner life difficult to read.

Living alone with his sister, he has been doing his best to play the adult.

The characters in Weathering with You, like us, struggle on while hiding what they really feel.

Yet the words they use to conceal those feelings can sound hollow and fail to touch us.

When their true feelings finally break through, they are fresh and moving.

I think one of the things Weathering with You depicts is the beauty of honest feeling.

I found no especially unusual English expression to discuss in this line.