Since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year, The Wind Rises has been the object of controversy for everything from its matter - of - fact depiction of the ubiquity of cigarettes in the postwar era (in one of my favorite scenes, Jiro and Honjo sit together in their Tokyo flat,
chain -
smoking in friendly silence) to its alleged trivialization of Japan's role in some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.