Ranting to /dev/null

Otakon 2003: Spirited Away

Friday afternoon I attended a panel on Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, known in Japan as "Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi". The panel was hosted by Susan J. Napier, Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Texas. She has recently published a book that I would very much like to read.

If you haven't seen Spirited Away, two things: first, shame on you; second, don't bother continuing because you won't get much out of this.

Napier has been studying anime and manga for the better part of three decades, and in this panel she basically went over some of her thoughts on Spirited Away. She pointed out a few major things that seem to be present in the film. First is the fact that Miyazaki himself identifies the bathhouse as a metaphor for modern Japan. Highly efficient, identifiably Eastern, but run in a Western style, if not by Westerners themselves. Yubaba's pad on the top floor is a very Western style apartment, in sharp contrast to the very Eastern bathhouse below. The bathhouse also seems to represent the kind of runaway consumption characteristic of industrual and post-industrial economies. I like this interpretation of the bathhouse image, especially as it seems to be what Miyazaki had in mind.

The other thing she pointed out is that making the star of the film a 10ish female is a fairly mainstream thing to do in current Japanese culture. There is apparently something of a captivation with girls between the ages of 9 and 14, "shojo", mostly to do with their freedom, lack of responsibility, and cuteness, but in some of the seedier sections of Japanese culture things start to move towards the erotic. Miyazaki, of course, completely avoides this unpleasant tendency, but he does have Chihiro exhibit the kind of darkening that this kind of "shojo" figure has done in the past decade or so. I don't have nearly enough knoweldge of trends in anime and manga to be able to comment intelligently here, but it makes sense from what I've seen.

She also noted that images of traditional Japanese culture are everywhere, starting from the first scene where Chihiro's family drives past an abandoned shrine collection by a back road. The river spirit she aids in the bathhouse is wearing a "no mask," apparently an example of exceptionally high Japanese culture. The scene where Haku feeds Chihiro some rice balls is said to move Japanese people to tears, as in Japan, rice balls have the same status that chicken soup does in America: a traditional, wholesome food given to people in need of nourishment. The medicine she uses to treat No-Face and Haku is the traditional medicine given her by the river spirit.

As she was mentioning these things, I came up with something of my own that I shared. No-Face, the monster that invades the bathhouse, is probably supposed to be a metaphor for traditional Japanese culture. He begins the movie fairly indistinct, but obviously belonging in the world Chihiro has stumbled into. He seems to have been neglected, and is lonely. He wants to care for Chihiro; he helps her, and offers her both bath tokens and eventually gold. But when he enters into the bathhouse, he goes kind of nuts. He consumes far too much and too fast, and eventually ingests three of the waitstaff. The solution to the rampaging monster he becomes is to give him the foul tasting medicine given Chihiro by the river spirit, and to get him out of the bathhouse. No-Face is recognized as a good character, who is useful and productive when in his place, but that place is not in the consumptive atmosphere of the bathhouse. In a sense, Miyazaki is saying that in abandoning traditional Japanese culture, not only have the Japanese lost something, but are actually endangering themselves, and that attempting to meet the needs of an ancient culture through consumption leads to disaster. (I was fairly pleased to find that this idea had not occured to Napier, and my comments won me a round of applause. This was definitely a high point of my day.)

I think all of these elements are probably symptomatic of a deeper theme throughout the whole movie: the strain of a simultaneously ancient and modern Japanese culture. This can again be seen from the fact that one of the first scenes is an obsevation of abandoned shrines around an ancient tree. It is consumption that gets Chihiro's parents in trouble. The wholesome food of the spirit world is either bitter (in the case of both the berry Chihiro eats to avoid disappearing and the medicine she receives), or bland (in the case of the rice balls [in a delicious twist of irony, one of the merchandising tie-ins for Spirited Away was a set of plastic rice balls]), but in every case deeply traditional. The evil half of the Yubaba/Zeneba persona is a capitalist businesswoman, while the grandmother figure is a very traditional grandmother who offers Chihiro tea upon entry.

Miyazaki may be suggesting that the differences between ancient and modern Japan are irreconcilable, but he also seems to be suggesting that both are necessary. Tying the two together seems to be something he believes that the Japanese must attempt, even if failure is unavoidable. But he certainly seems to believe that there is a goodness and wholesomeness to the ancient ways that is in danger of being lost, and in being lost, in turn endangers modern Japanese society.