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"Why am I crying?" indeed.
This is Makoto Shinkai's work we are talking about here. There are bound to be a few tearjerkers...- The Tiamat comet breaks apart in the atmosphere. One of the fragments lands right on Itomori, annihilating everyone within including Mitsuha herself, three years before Taki began swapping bodies with her. Mitsuha!Taki just drops to her knees when she saw the truth by her own eyes.
- Taki botching a date Mitsuha had set up with his senior Miki, because his heart had already gone to another love at this point. And Mitsuha crying over her Matchmaker Crush. While everyone involved all ended on good terms (Miki even found herself a new man and encouraged Taki forward on his own life), you can't help but wonder about the lives that could have been if the incident hadn't occurred.
- The strained relationships Mitsuha is having with almost everyone around her. Her mother passed away due to illness when she was young, and her father abandoned the family's Shinto tradition in his grief and was chased out by her grandmother for it, becoming deeply engrossed in work as the town mayor and leaving her and her little sister behind with their grandmother, unable to enjoy normal rural life like other children, who picked on her due to her status as mayor's daughter. It's even worse if you've read Another Side: Earthbound, which shows that she used to be very close to her father when they were younger.
- It's implied that Tessie is not entirely comfortable with his life either, despite his own wish to stay in Itomori, being a son of a big-name construction contractor. Another Side: Earthbound expands on this, showing that he struggles with desires to leave town badly enough that he actually fantasises about blowing up the town to cut the link.
- And speaking of Mitsuha's father, Another Side: Earthbound makes his tale this as well. After being disowned by his own family and enduring the disapproval of Hitoha to marry Futaba, she falls victim to an incurable illness he's powerless to do anything about, and all his attempts to search the whole of Japan for help did was make it such that he Never Got to Say Goodbye. Her death resulted in him falling into depression, as evidenced by his narration noting how everyone else seemed to be moving on just fine, and got him into his Start of Darkness.
- Yotsuha as well. At one point in her section, the light falls on Mitsuha in just the right way to make Yotsuha think she's seeing her mother, even though she was so young when Futaba died that she should have had no logical way to remember. It really shows how much of a void Futaba's absence has left in the family.
- Mitsuha travels to Tokyo in order to meet Taki in person. She finally found him just as she is about to give up but is heartbroken when he fails to recognize her, since this Taki will not switch bodies with her for another three years.
- After Taki realizes Mitsuha died three years ago, both of them start forgetting memories of one another. It gets to the point that Taki forgets why he came to Itomori even though he is standing right at the rim of the original meteor crater.
- Just when Mitsuha is about to write her name on Taki's hand, the movie just had to drop both of them back to their timeline before she finished.
- To yank the chain even harder, it happened before Mitsuha could write more than a single line on Taki's hand, but he at least had already finished writing on hers. When she forgets his name as the memories start to fade again, she looks at her hand and you can see the writing is still there... except instead of his name, he wrote "I love you". Mitsuha begins to cry because, heartwarming as the action is, it's not helping her remember who Taki is!
- Just when Mitsuha is about to write her name on Taki's hand, the movie just had to drop both of them back to their timeline before she finished.
- The realization, during the epilogue, that Taki and Mitsuha have spent the rest of their teenage years and their early adulthood (5 years for him, 8 years for her) haunted by a melancholic sense of longing for something that is missing from their lives, but they don't know what that thing is. Even though they don't remember each other's names and memories, they subconsciously remember the love they felt for each other, and this feeling and the void left by their absence have prevented them from moving on and finding happiness.
- The look on Mitsuha's face in the epilogue when Taki passed by her without recognizing her.
- Which quickly crosses into a happy kind of Tear Jerker when Taki turns around at the last second, calls out to Mitsuha and asks if they have met before. Mitsuha turns around and they both start crying Tears of Joy when they realize they have finally found what (or rather, who) they were looking for for so long.
