Makoto Shinkai, the romantic who keeps arguing with Japan about its disasters

Makoto Shinkai

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 9, 1973 Koumi, Nagano, Japan
Occupation	Animation filmmaker and novelist
Known for	Your Name., Weathering with You, Suzume
Awards	Japan Academy Film Prize · Los Angeles Film Critics Association · Sitges Film Festival, Best Animated Feature · Mainichi Film · Asia Pacific Screen

Makoto Shinkai’s films sell like romances and argue like editorials. In his three biggest hits, teenagers swap bodies across a few hundred kilometres, pray the rain away, or lock doors against an earthquake, and each love story carries a question Japan still has not settled: what a country owes the people a disaster took, and what it owes those who were spared. Audiences in Japan, China and South Korea filled cinemas for his answers. Critics kept asking whether the answers came too easily. Shinkai has spent the past decade replying to both, and his next film, which still has no public title, has already been sold to most of the world.

He was born Makoto Niitsu in Koumi, a mountain town in Nagano Prefecture where his family runs a construction company. He studied Japanese literature at Chuo University, joined its children’s literature club and drew picture books, and after graduating took a job at the video game company Nihon Falcom. He stayed five years, making game clips and graphic design, and met the composer Tenmon, who scored his early films.

The first film anyone noticed lasted five minutes. She and Her Cat, a black-and-white short that follows a young woman’s life from her cat’s point of view, won the grand prize at the DoGA CG Animation Contest in 2000. A drawing of a girl in a cockpit gripping a mobile phone grew into Voices of a Distant Star. Shinkai quit Falcom in 2001 to finish it and later put the real work at about seven months. Released in 2002, it was his first film with CoMix Wave Films, the company he helped found.

The features that followed built the template his fans still recognise. The Place Promised in Our Early Days won the Mainichi Film Award for best animation film in 2004. 5 Centimeters per Second, three linked short films about a boy and a girl drifting apart across years and train lines, won best animated feature at the 2007 Asia Pacific Screen Awards and became the work most associated with his name: commuter platforms, cherry blossom, late light through windows, a love that ends without anyone deciding to end it. After a year in London he made Children Who Chase Lost Voices, a journey into an underground world released in 2011, and The Garden of Words, a short feature from 2013 about a fifteen-year-old who wants to design shoes and the woman he keeps meeting in a Tokyo garden on rainy mornings.

Your Name changed the scale. The story of a Tokyo boy and a country girl who wake up in each other’s bodies while a comet closes in on her town opened in Japan in August 2016, overtook Spirited Away and remained the highest-grossing Japanese film until 2020. It won the Japan Academy Prize for screenplay of the year and best animated film from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, at the Sitges festival and at the Mainichi Film Awards. The band RADWIMPS wrote its music and stayed for the next two films.

The success came with a reading Shinkai did not expect. In Your Name the comet that destroys the girl’s town is undone: the two teenagers change the past and the townspeople survive. Released five years after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the film struck some viewers as a fantasy in which disaster leaves no consequence. Shinkai told The Japan Times that he “started to feel like I was really hated”, and that he asked himself whether to make a film his critics would like “or should I make one they’ll hate even more?” He chose the second. Weathering with You, released in 2019, ends with a runaway boy choosing the girl who can stop the rain over the city that needs her to keep stopping it, and with Tokyo partly under water three years later. Japan sent it to the Oscars as its international feature entry; it did not make the shortlist. “The hate surrounding Your Name actually helped me realize what I wanted to do as a creator,” he said. Reviewers had been calling him “the new Miyazaki” for years, a label he brushed off as an overestimation. He is just as unsentimental about the film his early fans love most, describing 5 Centimeters per Second as “a very immature and unfinished work”.

With Suzume he dropped the metaphor. A seventeen-year-old girl travels across Japan closing doors through which a giant worm escapes to cause earthquakes, and the road ends in her childhood hometown in Tōhoku, destroyed by the tsunami that killed her mother. Shinkai said he felt he should “express the impact” of the earthquake and tsunami “instead of continuing to depict it as a metaphor”, worried that memories of the disaster were growing hazy for teenagers too young to have lived it. Before its release in November 2022, the production committee warned audiences that the film used the sound of earthquake alerts and reassured them the alarms were fictional. Suzume earned ¥14.94 billion in Japan, became the highest-grossing Japanese film ever released in China, and in February 2023 competed at the Berlinale, the first anime in the festival’s main competition since Spirited Away. It was later nominated for the Golden Globe for best animated feature.

Shinkai, born on 9 February 1973, also writes the novels of his own films. He is married to the retired actress Chieko Misaka; their daughter, Chise Niitsu, born in 2010, works as a child actress.

Since Suzume, his work has kept circulating in other hands. A live-action 5 Centimeters per Second, directed by Yoshiyuki Okuyama and starring Hokuto Matsumura, who voiced Souta, the young keeper of the doors in Suzume, opened in Japanese cinemas in October 2025, with Shinkai credited for the original story. In spring 2026 the animated original returned to Japanese screens alongside a short documentary in which Shinkai revisits its locations with his team. In November 2025 he said he was working on a new film with “dependable companions”, and in his New Year message he promised that after “a long period of preparation” he would share concrete news about it during 2026.

The first concrete news came from the business side. In August 2026 Crunchyroll announced it had acquired distribution rights to the film worldwide, excluding almost all of Asia but including India, to be released together with Sony Pictures. The title, the story and the release date have not been made public. The fuller announcement he promised for 2026 will show whether the director of the disaster trilogy keeps arguing with it or finally leaves it behind.