A Sky Without Gods

The Day I Turned My Back on the Temple

I was sixteen when I walked out of my family’s neighborhood temple, never to return. The incense, the chants, the hollow rituals—they felt like a performance, not a connection. My parents, ever pragmatic, never pushed me back through those gates. But I remember standing at the bottom of the stone steps, looking up at the torii, and thinking: If this is faith, I want no part of it. I was too angry then to understand that what I was rejecting wasn’t faith itself, but the empty shells people build around it.

How I Learned to Worship the Wind

It wasn’t until I began drawing—really drawing—that I started to feel something stir in me again. Not belief, not yet, but reverence. I’d watch the wind move through the grass, the way light would shift across a puddle after rain, the way a bird in flight could seem both impossibly free and perfectly bound by gravity. These weren’t miracles, but they were close. I tried to capture them in sketches, in animation, and in stories. I realized I wasn’t drawing the world as it was—I was drawing the world as it could be, and in that space, I found something like prayer.

The War I Could Not Draw

I was young when I first saw the ruins of a bombed-out city. Not in a war I fought, but one that shaped my childhood nonetheless. I remember the silence afterward, the way the sky seemed heavier. When I grew older and began making films, I tried to avoid war. I didn’t want to glorify it, or even depict it. But somehow, it always found its way into the margins—airplanes in the sky, weapons in trembling hands, children trying to find their way home. I learned that faith isn’t only about peace. It’s about bearing witness. And that, even in the darkest stories, we can choose to show the light that still flickers.

The Forests That Remember

I once wrote a film where the forest spirits wept blood when poisoned. I didn’t realize at the time how much of my own grief I had poured into that image. I’ve always loved the land—our forests, rivers, and mountains. They’ve taught me more than any scripture. When I walk through a grove of old cedars, I feel like I’m standing among ancestors. Not human ones, but older ones. Guardians. I’ve come to believe that nature is not something we own—it’s something we are part of. And if there is a god, perhaps it lives not in temples or books, but in the breath of the earth itself.

What I Would Tell the Boy at the Torii

If I could speak to the boy I was—angry, confused, standing at the base of those temple steps—I wouldn’t tell him to go back. I’d tell him to keep looking. To keep drawing. To let go of the need for answers and instead learn how to ask better questions. Faith, I’d say, isn’t about certainty. It’s about wonder. About being small in the face of something vast and still choosing to look up. And I’d tell him that even when the world feels broken, there is still beauty worth protecting. Still stories worth telling. And still, always, a reason to hope.

Talk to Hayao Miyazaki on HoloDream about his films, his philosophy, or the quiet magic of everyday life.