Classroom Activities

Return to Your Name film guide
Pre-Screening Discussion

The conceptual questions outlined above are complex and intended to help instructors introduce the film and lead class discussion after students have watched the film. In simplified form, they can also serve as pre-screening discussion questions that prime students to watch the film analytically:

  1. What national traumas have you experienced? How are these events referenced and depicted in the media that you consume? Directly? Indirectly? Something in between?
  2. What stories about time travel have you read/watched? Why are time travel narratives appealing? What does time travel allow us to do (about the past)?
  3. The movie identifies a vague desire for a missing “something,” perhaps a home, a sense of belonging, another person, etc. Why are such desires powerful? How do you understand nostalgia? Why do people living in a chaotic present indulge in nostalgic fantasies of a seemingly better past (e.g., MAGA)?
  4. Cell phones and network technologies are ways of staying in touch and documenting our own lives. What is your own relationship to your cell phone? Does it store who you are?
  5. Why are traditions, religious ceremonies, and even superstitions appealing? Consider, for example, how popular astrology has become in recent years. Can these practices provide a sense of order in an otherwise overwhelming reality?
  6. Even though Your Name ultimately resolves any implication of queerness by returning the characters to their bodies and joining them in a straight union, it plays with gender stereotypes, sometimes for laughs and sometimes more meaningfully. What gender stereotypes do you expect to see in a Japanese film?
  7. What is the relationship between the rural and the urban in the United States? How is the rural represented in popular media? What films and TV shows deal with this binary?
  8. The film pokes fun at commodified traditions that urban consumers eat up as “rural authenticity.” While Japanese traditions are necessarily distinct from American ones, what similar dynamics play out in the US (e.g., “cabin core”)?

After a brief discussion, students will be ready to watch the film critically. Noticing details that pertain to the questions above as they watch will further equip them to analyze the film in a post-screening discussion and any related writing assignments. Some things to watch for:

  • missing or forgetting something/someone
  • Examples of “tradition” and characters’ responses to it
  • How the city is represented (bustling, stylish) vs. the countryside (quaint)
  • Scenes of disaster and its aftermath (e.g., news reports)
  • Cell phones as devices that help characters navigate the body swaps
  • Taki’s drawings and his response to the photo exhibit
  • Thresholds, moments and places when characters can pass between realms

Suggested Sequences for Analysis

  •  Commodified tradition

Although Your Name indulges in showing local Japanese traditions, it also ironically undercuts this nostalgic tone. In a sequence early in the film, Mitsuha and her younger sister perform on stage at their Shinto temple. The dance is presented in a reverent way: an initial high angle shot looks up at the stage where Mitsuha and her sister dance, positioning the viewer among the audience. The film then cuts to a close shot of a tape player next to a brightly lit torch. The torch crackles loudly, lending the scene a sense of earthliness, a connection to the past when fire, not electricity provided warmth and light. The fire’s crackle, however, is accompanied by traditional music played back on a modern device. The absence of live music here underscores that tradition can only be brought back partially, with the help of modern technological devices that provide the right ambiance.

Later, when the two sisters are going home after the performance, the younger girl suggests to Mitsuha that she can market their tradition by selling the ritual sake in Tokyo, packing the traditional liquor with photos and videos of herself. Mitsuha considers the possibility and imagines what an ad of her “Shrine Maiden Sake” might look like. The sake ad proclaims that the beverage was “prepared by a current female high school student” and that a “real photo is included.” Mitsuha is suddenly embarrassed and dismisses the idea. The moment is a parody of various “traditional” products which appeal nostalgically to urban consumers who buy “authenticity,” in a bottle, so to speak. Yet the film ultimately redeems this strange beverage, derived from very old brewing practices unknown to most modern Japanese people. When the Tokyo urbanite Taki drinks the sake later in the film, it allows him to travel through time and body swap one last time to save Mitsuha and her village. Tradition is thus both embraced as a cosmic solution that alleviates guilt about 3/11 by allowing a rescue and presented parodically as a commodity that sells well to urban audiences.

How can these paragraphs be enriched and expanded with details and close analysis?

    • How does Mitsuha relate to her own role in preserving tradition? She is embarrassed to be making the sake—why?
    • How is tradition gendered? How is it sexualized? On one hand, Mitsuha is embarrassed because her classmates think the chewed sake is gross, but the “high school” “shrine maiden” advertisement might also embarrass her for more unsettling reasons.
    • What does tradition “do” here? How does the town relate to the performance? What irony do you see in the younger sister’s suggestion that Mitsuha use the sake to make money to leave Itomori and move to Tokyo?

 

  • Itomori disappeared and forgotten

After the body swaps abruptly end, Taki becomes obsessed with Itomori and Mitsuha, eventually setting out on a trip to the countryside with his friends to find her. Taki finally locates Itomori when he shows a drawing of the town to a ramen shop owner in Gifu Prefecture, where he had surmised Itomori must be located. When he arrives, the area where the town used to be is blocked off with “keep out” signage, a sight that reminds viewers of Japan’s post 3/11 “exclusion zones.” These places of nuclear devastation, like the ruins of Itomori, are out of bounds. A long shot of the lake, now enlarged by a meteor crater, shows that three years on, the town remains in ruins. No one lives here and no one is rebuilding it. The sequence alternates shots of the devastation with medium and close shots of Taki’s face, using his dismay to increase the sense of loss and devastation visible in the landscape. His friends think that Taki has made a mistake, he cannot have traveled here recently: “Taki must be misremembering.” Taki replies that he in fact remembers this area; he recognizes the ruins of various buildings. His friend replies: “Surely, you remember that disaster three years ago, where hundreds died?” Taki appears bewildered, apparently he doesn’t. Frantically, he begins looking through his phone for Mitsuha’s diary entries, insisting that he has proof that she existed. As he pores over the phone, visible in an extreme close shot, her entries first scramble into a strange code and then disappear completely. After the phone indicates that there are “no entries,” the film cuts back to a long shot, Taki and his friends stand at the edge of the abyss behind which the town of Itomori used to be. “They’re disappearing…” he mutters. The physical ruin of the town is thus entangled with a loss or absence of memory. Taki does and does not remember at once. He knows Itomori but he has no idea it was spectacularly destroyed. The phone, a device that had allowed his connection to Mitsuha, fails him. He must look for evidence of her existence elsewhere.

How can this paragraph be enriched and expanded with details and close analysis?

    • How is the devastation represented? We see bird’s eye view shots, but the characters cannot enter the zone, they look on from a distance. What cinematic devices heighten the sense of a haunted, eerie space?
    • Why is Itomori abandoned? Towns devastated by the tsunami could be rebuilt, it’s the nuclear exclusion zones that have remain abandoned. Notice ways that Itomori speaks to the compounded effects of the three disasters of 3/11.
    • How does Taki learn about what happened? What kids of sources does he turn to? How do these sources describe and illustrate Itomori?

Approaches to Essays

Writing about film works most effectively when visual analysis supports the argumentation about what the film means. Close attention to specific moments in the film allows students to tease out tensions and complexities rather than regurgitate generalizations. The goal is to observe details and figure how they work together to produce meaning (as patterns, binaries, etc.). Shifting from deductive to inductive reasoning will help avoid essays that are repetitive and predictable. Even if students begin with an obvious claim, “Your Name romanticizes the countryside,” requiring them to examine how the film represents rural life in reference to specific sequences will give them an opportunity to add complexity to this claim, showing that the film is also quite cynical in its representation of the urban/rural binary. The book Writing Analytically offers a simple framing that I’ve found to be incredibly useful in teaching writing to incoming undergraduates: “Although X appears to account for Z, Y accounts for it better” (154). This approach adds tension to the argumentation, allowing students to develop a nuanced argument that can account for contradictions and anomalies in the film that they are writing about. Your Name brims with productive tensions and contradictions that are sketched out in the materials above. First discussing the conceptual questions in class and then adapting them as essay assignments that require students to expand on initial claims and mobilize textual evidence to produce an argument develops critical thinking skills. Going through such exercises especially in relation to a pop culture product can help students relate to content they consume in their everyday lives in a more critical way.

Your Name in Comparative Perspective

  • Korean Pork Belly Rhapsody, a recent Netflix show about Korea’s pork belly gastronomic tradition, gives another perspective on the rural/urban binary. Like the Japanese local traditions in Your Name, pork belly is presented as both a Korean “essence” and a commodity in contemporary cities.
  • Li Ziqi is a content creator who rose to fame in China in recent years. Her YouTube Channel features short videos in which Li performs various types of rural activities in a highly nostalgic setting. These videos are not representative of actual rural life in China. They create a nostalgic atmosphere for the enjoyment of urban viewers. There is relatively little dialogue, so the videos can be watched without knowledge of Chinese.
  • The 2021 Chinese romantic television show Meet Yourself, available on the streaming site Viki, is another recent Chinese media production that imagines the countryside as a place personal renewal and of escape from the stress of living in China’s cities.
  • Suzume, Shinkai’s most recent film, was just released theatrically but will soon be available online. Like Your Name, Suzume uses Japanese “tradition” to prevent catastrophes. Unlike Your Name, the film’s plot directly references 3/11. Almost all of the themes discussed above can relate to Suzume as well as they do to Your Name.
  • Shin Godzilla, a 2016 film by Anno Hideaki, is a retelling of the Godzilla story for a post 3/11 Japan. It is available to rent online. By extension, the 2006 Korean film The Host by Bong Joon-ho of Parasite fame, imagines a Godzilla type monster who ravished Seoul before being vanquished by an ordinary family.
  • Tim Shao-Hung Teng argues that Your Name belongs to the so-called sekai-kei genre in which “romance between a heroine and male protagonist unfolds against an ongoing apocalyptic crisis” (462). Teng cites the television show Neon Genesis Evangelion as an example of the genre. Students who watch anime may be familiar with the program.

Supplementary Materials

  • Tamaki Mihic’s Re-Imagining Japan after Fukushima is available Open Access on JSTOR. Chapter 4 addresses Your Name specifically.
  • The University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies provides this pdf of resources on 3/11.
  • Kazuoko Stone and Laurel Singleton of the Program for Teaching East Asia at the University of Colorado prepared a lesson plan on 3/11 available here.
  • Tim Graf & Jakob Montrasio’s 2012 The Soul of Zen is a documentary about Buddhist responses to the disaster. It is available on Vimeo in a version edited specifically for educators. Remember that Your Name is about Shinto traditions, which differ from Buddhist practices. Shinto practices predate Buddhism, which arrived in Japan by transmission from the Asian mainland. The two religions are not adversarial but co-exist, often complementing each other.