Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki was born on January 5, 1941, in the town Akebono-cho in Hongō, Tokyo City, Empire of Japan, the second of four sons. His father, Katsuji Miyazaki (born 1915), was the director of Miyazaki Airplane, his brother's company, which manufactured rudders for fighter planes during World War II. The business allowed his family to remain affluent during Miyazaki's early life. Miyazaki's father enjoyed purchasing paintings and demonstrating them to guests, but otherwise had little known artistic understanding. He was in the Imperial Japanese Army around 1940, discharged and lectured about disloyalty after declaring to his commanding officer that he wished not to fight because of his wife and young child. According to Miyazaki, his father often told him about his exploits, claiming he continued to attend nightclubs after turning 70. Katsuji Miyazaki died on March 18, 1993. After his death, Miyazaki felt he had often looked at his father negatively and that he had never said anything "lofty or inspiring". He regretted not having a serious discussion with his father, and felt he had inherited his "anarchistic feelings and his lack of concern about embracing contradictions".

Some of Miyazaki's earliest memories are of "bombed-out cities". In 1944, when he was three years old, Miyazaki's family evacuated to Utsunomiya. After the bombing of Utsunomiya in July 1945, he and his family evacuated to Kanuma. The bombing left a lasting impression on Miyazaki, then aged four. As a child, Miyazaki suffered from digestive problems, and was told he would not live beyond 20, making him feel like an outcast; he considered himself "clumsy and weak", protected at school by his older brother. From 1947 to 1955, Miyazaki's mother Yoshiko suffered from spinal tuberculosis; she spent the first few years in hospital before being nursed from home, forcing Miyazaki and his siblings to take over domestic duties. Yoshiko was frugal, and described as a strict, intellectual woman who regularly questioned "socially accepted norms". She was closest with Miyazaki, and had a strong influence on him and his later work. Yoshiko Miyazaki died in July 1983 at the age of 72.

Miyazaki began school as an evacuee in 1947, at an elementary school in Utsunomiya, completing the first through third grades. After his family moved back to Suginami-ku in 1950, Miyazaki completed the fourth grade at Ōmiya Elementary School, and fifth grade at Eifuku Elementary School, which was newly established after splitting off from Ōmiya Elementary. After graduating from Eifuku as part of the first graduating class, he attended Ōmiya Junior High School. He aspired to become a manga artist, but discovered he could not draw people; instead, he drew planes, tanks, and battleships for several years. Miyazaki was influenced by several manga artists, such as Tetsuji Fukushima, Soji Yamakawa and Osamu Tezuka. Miyazaki destroyed much of his early work, believing it was "bad form" to copy Tezuka's style as it was hindering his own development as an artist. He preferred to see artists like Tezuka as fellow artists rather than idols to worship. Around this time, Miyazaki often saw movies with his father, who was an avid moviegoer; memorable films for Miyazaki include Meshi (1951) and Tasogare Sakaba (1955).

After graduating from Ōmiya Junior High, Miyazaki attended Toyotama High School. During his third and final year, Miyazaki's interest in animation was sparked by Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958), Japan's first feature-length animated film in color; he had sneaked out to watch the film instead of studying for his entrance exams. Miyazaki later recounted that, falling in love with its heroine, the film moved him to tears and left a profound impression, prompting him to create work true to his own feelings instead of imitating popular trends; he wrote the film's "pure, earnest world" promoted a side of him that "yearned desperately to affirm the world rather than negate it". After graduating from Toyotama, Miyazaki attended Gakushuin University in the department of political economy, majoring in Japanese Industrial Theory; he considered himself a poor student as he instead focused on art. He joined the "Children's Literature Research Club", the "closest thing back then to a comics club"; he was sometimes the sole member of the club. In his free time, Miyazaki would visit his art teacher from middle school and sketch in his studio, where the two would drink and "talk about politics, life, all sorts of things". Around this time, he also drew manga; he never completed any stories, but accumulated thousands of pages of the beginnings of stories. He also frequently approached manga publishers to rent their stories. In 1960, Miyazaki was a bystander during the Anpo protests, having developed an interest after seeing photographs in Asahi Graph; by that point, he was too late to participate in the demonstrations. Miyazaki graduated from Gakushuin in 1963 with degrees in political science and economics.