When Spirited Away was released back in 2001 I was teaching Japanese and English literature in a New Zealand high school. Bridging both subjects, I’ve shown the DVD of Spirited Away to a large number of students. It’s an annoying 2h 5m — ideally teachers want a text which either fills an entire unit or neatly fills one or two lessons.
New Zealand teenagers enjoyed watching Spirited Away — few of them had seen anything like it before. Also, it meant they didn’t have to do any hard work that period. Most were happy to walk out halfway after an hour, and never asked to see the rest. But I remember the students who fell in love. Those kids fell in love hard.
Why do so many of us find Spirited Away utterly foreign? I have some theories.
A DEPICTION OF JAPAN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Spirited Away is a depiction of Nihon e no kaiki (return to Japan). Miyazaki started this in Princess Mononoke and his depiction of 14th century Japan. (Hagiwara Sakutarō wrote a famous essay on Return To Japan, 1938, which has been translated into English by R.S. Morrison, who read his translation on YouTube.) Miyazaki doesn’t present Return to Japan as a problem-free thing, but critiques it, creating tension between generations (Chihiro and her parents, who are pigs), the natural environment versus the newer, polluted environment, and the waning of traditional customs.
Where Westerners will relate: The problems with industrialisation and excess consumption.
EVOKING THE MYSTERIOUS PAST
Hayao Miyazaki describes the fantasy arena of Spirited Away as a ‘fushigi na machi‘ (mysterious town, with wonderful connotations). He showed us this world earlier in Tonari no totoro (My Neighbour Totoro). In this world, repressed elements of Japanese society remain on the fringes. This world is a blend of old Japan and new, 21st century Japan. It doesn’t exist, except in imagination. This world is inaccessible unless you really want to go there. But first you have to find the knowledge to enter.
These repressed aspects of Japan are more evident in Princess Mononoke with is nature spirits and Othered women and so on, but here we have the carnivalesque iteration. Bath houses, too, have mostly disappeared from modern Japan (except when Japanese people go on holiday).
Westerners have long considered Japan a land unto itself.
JAPANESE METAPHORS
PUBLIC BATH HOUSES
The bath house in Spirited Away is the most obvious entry to Old Japan.
In Japan, bathing is a metaphor for life renewal. The act of bathing renews purity, cleanliness, vigour and even the self. The bathhouse spirits, for Japanese people, will evoke imagery from ancient folklore. Japanese viewers feel they have seen them before, somewhere.
Except for a few. No Face is a Miyazaki creation and does not come from folklore. This combination of familiar and unfamiliar lends the bath house a deliberately creepy vibe.
The bath house of Spirited Away is beautiful, dominates the setting and is a bricolage of architecture: part Maiji, part Tokugawa, part Chinese restaurant. Some have pointed out similarities to the paintings of Peter Breughel and Hieronymous Bosch, who dealt in the grotesque.
In Japan, there are two conflicting desires: To encounter the unexpected (and sometimes frightening), but also to return to a stable point of origin. The ghosts in Spirited Away take viewers back to a ghostly past where they can escape the mundane contemporary world.
This fictional bathhouse is the perfect example of a liminal space.
The entire action of Spirited Away takes place within three liminal contexts — a journey (specifically, a move from an old home to a new one), an abandoned theme park, and, finally, the fantasy other world […] in this film the furusato has become both alienated and phantasmatic.
Susan J. Napier, The Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 287-310
*phantasmatic: an epistemological object whose presence or absence cannot be definitely located.
The bath house is also marginal, as well as liminal. To Japanese and non-Japanese audiences alike, this is a deliberately defamiliarized place. Miyazaki has estranged it from the Japanese furusato.
Why is Miyazaki wishing to defamiliarize a Japanese bath house for Japanese audiences? The bath house is problematic, and stands in for a society in disequilibrium. This is a society of excess gone awry and carnival out-of-control. The threat to Japan is coming from inside the house.
THE FURUSATO
Furusato literally means “old village,” but its closer English. equivalents are “home” and “native place.” Further connotations which get lost in a simplistic translation:
historicity
age
quaintness
the patina of familiarity and naturalness that cultural artifacts and human relationships acquire with age, use and interaction. (See: Robertson’s paper “It Takes A Village”.)
Ricard, M. (2019) ‘On the Border Territory Between the Animal and the Vegetable Kingdoms’: Plant-Animal Hybridity and the Late Victorian Imagination. Gothic Nature. 1, 127-154. Available here. Published: 14 September 2019
The Hollywood Reporter headling: Oscars: Has ‘Parasite’ ushered in a golden age of odd films?
だいこんと34人の子どもたち 羽子岡紀子 The Big Radish and the 34 Children by Noriko Hakooka. The author made this picture book after finding a small pink note attached to a radish she purchased. The note was from a class at a primary school explaining that they had raised the radish. She wrote back and started something.
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A DIFFERENT NARRATIVE HISTORY
The Witch’s Magic Cloth (やまんばのにしき) by Miyoko Matsutani, illustrated by Yasuo Segawa, Poplar Publishing, 1967
A mountain witch who lived in Chofuku Mountain had a baby. The witch asked the village people to pound steamed rice into cakes and bring them to her. Two young men, led on the way by an old woman “Akazabanba”, carried the rice cakes to the witch. During the journey, the young men scared the witch and ran off. Akazabanba went up the mountain alone to prevent a disaster to the village.
‘Mountain Witch of the Ashigara Mountains’ – Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 1845
The witch asked Akazabanba to lend her a hand for 21 days. As a reward she gave Akazabanba a magic cloth that would not diminish even if used continuously. Akazabanba gave the magic cloth to the village people. Akazabanba’s love and courage towards the villagers helped the village and made the people happy.
This story has been told for many years in the Akita district of Tohoku. The pictures have been created with a beautiful and elegant touch like Japanese-style paintings, evoking a bright and happy atmosphere.
Grumpa’s Kindergarten (ぐるんぱのようちえん) by Minami Nishiuchi, illustrated by Seiichi Horiuchi
Grumpa, the young elephant, was ordered to start work. He went to work for a biscuit maker, a shoe maker, a car maker, and so on. However, his efforts were in vain because all he could make were jumbo-sized goods that nobody would buy. Grumpa was very disappointed and began to think that he would never be able to work properly.
Just then, he happened upon a busy mother with 12 children, and so found a job which would make him the happiest elephant in the world. He set to work creating a wonderful playground with the huge things he had already made
Modern Japan has as much Hollywood influence as anywhere these days, but the history of narrative is really quite different. For one thing, Japan’s policy of sakoku kept the entire country isolated for 220 years, ending in 1868. Hell, that’s only 73 years before Hayao Miyazaki was born. His grandparents would’ve been born around that time. During sakoku, Japan developed its own distinctive morality and ideologies — the whole entire point of sakoku — and I’m sure this is all part of why Japanese stories feel so… well, Japanese. Even today.
So why does Spirited Away feel so unusual? Take the bones of the plot. An adolescent girl goes through a fantasy portal by accident. So far, so familiar. She takes her parents. That’s a bit unusual. How many Western portal fantasies can you think of in which the parents go along for that ride?
However, Miyazaki does dispatch with the parents, not by the usual Western means but by turning them into pigs. This is way more disturbing than most Western stories. I mean, you might find the White Witch disturbing, but she is clearly a fantasy figure. Turning one’s own parents into pigs, though? The safety of home is demolished. There’s no notion of Home in this Home-Away-Home plot. On top of that, it’s so gruesomely unexpected:
I want someone to explain to me why Ghibli films make me feel relaxed almost the moment they start. They’re like warm cuddly blankets. Until someone turns into a pig anyway.
That’s not what the story seemed to promise! If this was going to include parents as pigs, shouldn’t we have been given due warning? Like, a more ominous soundtrack or something?
This where I think non-Japanese audiences are at a disadvantage — this story never promised a utopian, carnivalesqueadventure. Hayao Miyazaki makes his movies for his own Japanese audience, and doesn’t hand-hold non-Japanese people through the parts we might miss. I think this is totally fair enough — Japanese audiences have been expected to just get Hollywood films with no hand-holding ever since the beginning of Hollywood.
Here’s the spooky, ominous foreshadowing of Spirited Away, which I find a genuinely spooky of the real Japan:
Utagawa Yoshifuji, Cat’s Variety Show, a popular image in Japan dating from the early Meiji period
Despite its dazzling imagery and appealing fantasy mise-en-scene, Spirited Away is less an upbeat fantasy than a complex exploration of a contemporary Japan that is searching for what might be termed cultural recovery, or perhaps cultural rehabilitation, in a corrupt postindustrial society. This search involves a quest to rediscover and reincorporate elements of purity, self-sacrifice, endurance, and team spirit, all of which have been historically regarded as quintessentially Japanese, and reintegrate them into a form that has resonance for the contemporary world.
[…]
The film contains motifs of chaos and carnival (highly unusual in a Miyazaki work) that are at once evocative of the Japanese festival (matsuri) while at the same time they comment on the negative aspects of consumption in industrialized societies. Furthermore, it employs postmodern approaches such as bricolage and pastiche to create settings that contain Western and Chinese elements as well as Japanese ones. Much of the extraordinary visual pleasure of the film comes from this amalgam of diverse motifs and images. But these elements themselves can be seen as characteristic of contemporary Japanese society, a culture remarkable for its incorporation of disparate elements.
Susan J. Napier, The Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 287-310
A DIFFERENT WAY OF CRAFTING STORY
Hayao Miyazaki is revered in Japan, has his own studio and does what he likes.
Despite having a rich plot with developed characters, Spirited Away was not made with a script. In fact, Miyazaki’s films never had scripts. “I don’t have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film,” the filmmaker told Midnight Eye. “I usually don’t have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing.”
Miyazaki does not know where the plot is going, and he lets it happen organically. “It’s not me who makes the film. The film makes itself and I have no choice but to follow”
Mental Floss
That’s not how Hollywood movies are scripted. Many scriptwriters are involved, for starters. By the time filming begins, there exists a script that has been through many revisions. Hollywood audiences are used to seeing films which conform to a certain basic story roadmap. I talk about that a lot on this blog — screenwriting gurus such as Michael Hauge, Blake Snyder, Syd Field and Robert McKee all explain the plots of American movies in slightly different ways.
Yubaba is very much a Baba Yaga character. Interestingly, the Japanese Baba is a false cognate. Both old women are terrible, and both will let young people off the hook so long as the young person does chores. They value hard work, in other words.
The ogre’s appetite expresses nothing more than the wrong kind of desire, love in excess.
Ogres are not only large adult humans, but they have a remarkable affinity with children. Infants are very different from giants but are the same time represented as rather like them. The monsters of popular dread, with their unbridled appetite, insatiable tyranny, unappeasable desire for gratification, are just like babies, big babies, as big as babes are when they explode into a life and change it. Ogres are voracious, stupid, clumsy, bumbling, vulnerable to the cleverness of human wits; they have big heads; they are in spite of their size rather easily overcome; they eat human flesh. Mythic stories frequently proceed with the punning literal-mindedness of dreams while all the time inverting experience in a form of negation. So, is it not possible that the ogre contains a concealed portrait of an infant?
Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman
The world of the bathhouse initially appears to stand in contrast to the deterritorialized modern world of consumption and materialism. Its structure and organization, a vertical hierarchy based on teamwork, suggests prewar Japanese social structures, such as the ie or extended household (as well as modern Japanese corporations). But the bathhouse may evoke other associations. The fact that it is ruled by a woman who resides at the top of the bathhouse hints at links to the matriarchal [sic] culture of early Japan, out of which came the indigenous Shinto myth of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the progenitrix of the imperial family. Indeed, as Shimizu points out, the film is dominated by powerful female presences who, besides Chihiro and Yubaba, also include Yubaba’s kinder twin sister, Zeniba, and Chihiro’s confidante, the bath attendant Lin. Even Haku, who is the most important male figure in the story, has a suggestively androgynous appearance and, as the audience discovers at the end, is actually a river god and thus associated with the feminine principle of water. […]
The bathhouse organization privileges traditionally sanctioned virtues such as endurance and hard work, as seen by the fact that the only way Chihiro can rescue her parents is by taking whatever job is offered to her, no matter how burdensome. Chihiro must also relinquish her name and identity, suggesting that she must subordinate herself to the group, another value connected with indigenous Japanese social structures such as the prewar ie, or extended family. Finally, the jobs she is given evoke the teachings of the native Shinto religion, one of whose central tenets is the cleansing of pollution.
Susan J. Napier, The Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 287-310
(*I have sympathy for the view that there has never been a matriarchal human culture. There are, however, numerous examples of matrilineal cultures. In order to be matriarchal, as the world is today patriarchal, there needs to be systemic power based around gender, which extends far beyond the household.)
Commensality, a willingness to eat together, is a powerful social glue in pre-industrial societies. To accept food is to make oneself part of a community. Ina poignant Irish lullaby, a young woman refuses to eat the food of the fairies, declaring: ‘I have eaten no bite nor supped no drink of theirs/ But cold mashed potatoes on my father’s dresser!’ This fairy-taken woman desperately revisits her home to eat their leftovers, and the food she eats symbolises her status as an outsider with nothing of her own.
Diane Purkiss, Troublesome things: A history of fairies and fairy stories
Knock Three Times by Margaret Tarrant. The caption reads: “Do have one!”
FURTHER READING
My favourite film posters for Spirited Away are the Chinese ones by artist Huang Hai.
Japan’s Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace
Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan’s Castles: termCitadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a case study to explore aspects of Japan’s modern history including historical memory, cultural heritage, and state-civil society and national-regional relations. The authors show that although castles entered the modern era as a symbol of the dark “feudal” past Japan hoped to leave behind, they quickly took on a diverse set of functions and meanings. According to Benesch and Zwigenberg, urban castles in particular—such as those in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya—were important to the formation of both national and regional identities, playing key symbolic and practical roles as parks, military garrisons, representations of various collective pasts, etc. Especially as society was militarized in the 1930s, castles came to be celebrated as a unification of modernity and tradition, the imperial and local, military and civilian. Though the political climate and the valences of Japan’s recent and more distant pasts were thrown into upheaval with war and defeat, even after 1945 castles retained a literally and figuratively large footprint in Japan. The authors explore the divergent histories of castles including Hiroshima, Kanazawa, and Kokura and the “castle boom” of the early postwar decades to illustrate ongoing tensions between visions for individual regions and Japan itself in the period of national rebuilding that followed World War II, and conclude with reflections on the significance of the current wave of castle reconstructions with “authentic” materials and techniques in the context of growing global interest in cultural heritage as a kind of intellectual property that conveys both soft power and hard currency. Whether dismantled or garrisoned or transformed into munitions factories or parks, and whether original, bombed, rebuilt, or conjured up as roadside attractions, Benesch and Zwigenberg show that the shifting circumstances and meanings of castles can teach us much about Japan’s modern history.
A thirtieth‑century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red‑haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit—what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises.
In Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art(Yale UP, 2018), Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this extraordinary Japanese filmmaker to provide a definitive account of his oeuvre. Napier insightfully illuminates the multiple themes crisscrossing his work, from empowered women to environmental nightmares to utopian dreams, creating an unforgettable portrait of a man whose art challenged Hollywood dominance and ushered in a new chapter of global popular culture.
The Daikon of Spirited Away may seem a bit odd to Westerners, but the West has its own tradition of part-vege, part-person.
Greetings from Carrotcountry. One happy Family German postcard c 1917“New Year greeting cards from Victorian England. The first impulse is to look at these cards and think, “Well, weren’t those Victorians wacky.” Why would you send someone a picture of a potato? But what if… what if this was Victorians having a laugh? We are inclined to exoticize our own ancestors as we exoticize unfamiliar contemporary cultures.
CONTEMPORARY FICTION SET IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND (2023)
On paper, things look fine. Sam Dennon recently inherited significant wealth from his uncle. As a respected architect, Sam spends his days thinking about the family needs and rich lives of his clients. But privately? Even his enduring love of amateur astronomy is on the wane. Sam has built a sustainable-architecture display home for himself but hasn’t yet moved into it, preferring to sleep in his cocoon of a campervan. Although they never announced it publicly, Sam’s wife and business partner ended their marriage years ago due to lack of intimacy, leaving Sam with the sense he is irreparably broken.
Now his beloved uncle has died. An intensifying fear manifests as health anxiety, with night terrors from a half-remembered early childhood event. To assuage the loneliness, Sam embarks on a Personal Happiness Project:
