The place where pure water is

running in the depths of the forest

in the deep mountains, where
no human has ever set foot, the
Japanese have long held such a
place in their heart.
Hayao Miyazaki 19981

J
APANESE ADORE THE ANIMATED FEATURE FILMS OF
Hayao Miyazaki. Children often know the dialogues by
heart, and grandparents, salarymen and teenagers enjoy
them just as enthusiastically. Toys and merchandise of his ani-
mated creations occupy an important space in Japan’s ‘char-
acter culture’. Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) eclipsed
Steven Spielberg’s E.T. to create a new domestic box-office
record, only to be nudged out by James Cameron’s Titanic in the
same year. Four years later, Miyazaki’s follow-up, Spirited Away
(2001) became Japan’s highest grossing film and received global
recognition with the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
and the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Despite
commercial success and increasing global attention, Miyazaki’s
production studio, Studio Ghibli, is a self-contained, proudly non-
computerised anime house where artists are exhorted to draw
everything by hand.
In addition to examining his recent box-office success Spir-
ited Away, this essay will offer an alternative reading of one of
Miyazaki’s earliest feature films, Nausicaa of the Valley of the
Winds (1984). Nausicaa marked his expansion from comic artist
to film director with the translation of his popular and long-run-
ning manga (comic) of the same name into an animated film. Our
specific focus is how Miyazaki infuses his richly detailed works
with an animistic worldview that references Japanese beliefs,
practices and mythology deriving from Shintoism. In these films,
pre-modern expressions of Shintoism are visually transformed
and introduced to a largely urban audience through symbolic

46 • Metro Magazine No. 143


moments that offer a resonant connection, albeit a mediated one,
with the natural and spiritual worlds revered by the Japanese.
Hayao Miyazaki: Global Gaze, Local Focus
The global reception of Miyazaki’s work has accompanied a
wider export of Japanese popular culture which Douglas McGray
coins Japan’s ‘Gross National Cool’.2 It is suggested that such
success is built on Japan’s unique ability to ‘glocalise’ a host of
foreign influences for re-packaging to a global market. As media
and cultural critic Koichi Iwabuchi notes, Japan’s recent cultural
expansion is premised on a strategy of blurring distinctively Japa-
nese attributes of exports to create ‘culturally odourless prod-
ucts’.3 In particular, animation and game software destined for
LUCY WRIGHT & JERRY CLODE
export are prone to mu-kokuseki—the erasure of racial and ethnic
characteristics and any context that would embed a specific cul-
ture or country.4 The strategy has been refined and ‘perfected’ in
Japan’s immediate cultural markets in East and South-east Asia,
where a resurgent Japanese presence sits uncomfortably with
historical memory and narratives of nation.
Initial academic focus on Miyazaki has similarly scrutinized his
films for diluted identity, in particular, there is debate as to wheth-
er Miyazaki’s characters can be described as ‘Japanese’. While
most of Miyazaki’s characters have distinctly Western features—
large eyes, pale skin, red hair—they have, however, also curiously
been (reverse) assimilated and ‘Japan-ized’ for consumption by a
local audience. American anime scholar Susan Napier suggests
Metro Magazine No. 143 • 47
that Miyazaki’s non-committed expression
of ethnic features allows his characters
to exemplify more Western models of
courage and heroism. By merging Japa-
nese and foreign traits, he is able to subtly
erase traditional distinctions, providing a
textual template to infuse his characters
with new possibility and optimism.5 Most
of Miyazaki’s lead characters are young
girls whose bravado stands in contrast to
the scarcity of convincing female protago-
nists presented in the passively feminine
shojo genre that dominates mainstream
anime. In one of Miyazaki’s earlier films,
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), the enter-
prise and courage of a young witch is
brought out by a thoroughly European
setting, complete with unfamiliar continen-
tal architecture, puzzling geography and
troublesome traffic.
As an artist, Miyazaki works within a
continuous local tradition of cultural and
aesthetic appropriation, which anima-
tion theorist Paul Wells identifies as a
fundamental attribute of Japanese artistic
expression.6 Rather than a convention of
covert creolization, Miyazaki’s broaden-
48 • Metro Magazine No. 143
ing appeal is located in the creation of a
hybrid Japanese ‘modern myth’ that is ac-
cessible (in different ways) to post-indus-
trialized audiences all over the world. Nau-
sicaa exemplifies the kind of ‘globalizing’
of storytelling that is intrinsic to his work.
He has previously noted that the inspira-
tions for the film’s narrative and charac-
ters derive from such diverse sources as
Homer’s Odyssey, Frank Herbert’s Dune
and the Japanese folk tale The Princess
Who Loved Insects.
While openly acknowledging the impor-
tance of hybridity to his work, Miyazaki
admits his primary concern is how his
films are viewed and received in Japan.
We would argue here that Japanese audi-
ences have been able to form a cinephiliac
relationship to Miyazaki’s work built on
his transformation and reinvigoration of
the tenets of Shintoism and local mythol-
ogy, which form a constellation of filmic
codes peculiar to his cinematic style and
reception. For example, a non-Japanese
audience viewing Princess Mononoke can
clearly read the symbolic beheading of
the spirit of the forest in terms of globally
RIGHT PAGE BOTTOM LEFT-MIDDLE:
SPIRITED AWAY; PRINCESS MONONOKE ALL
OTHERS: NAUSICAA
circulating narratives of environmental de-
struction, whereas a Japanese audience
are also likely to simultaneously engage
here with specific allusions to kami, or
gods, and Shintoist tenets of respecting
and communing with nature’s deities.
The Way of the Kami
I’ve come to the point where I just can’t
make a movie without addressing the
problem of humanity as part of an ecosys-
tem.
Hayao Miyazaki 19987
One of the few surviving animistic and
pantheistic religions, Shinto is deeply
connected to the Japanese landscape.
Awe-inspiring aspects of the natural
world are seen to possess kami, or gods,
who are celebrated through ritual and
ceremony. During the crystallization of
Shintoist beliefs in the early Jomon period
(10,000 BC-300 BC), respect for the kami
was seen as inseparable from people’s
intuitive reverence and love of nature.
While ethereal, kami were not considered
omniscient and distant in the Christian or
Muslim sense, but often thought of in a
similar way to the Greek gods: capable of
fascination with nature, two young girls
are connected with a gentle, teddy bear-
ish woodland kami, O-Totoro, (King Totoro)
who provides them with solace and guid-
ance during their mother’s illness.
Shinto does not strictly divide the world
between material and spiritual, nor
tem. Many of Miyazaki’s films address the
consequences of upsetting this balance,
either through wholesale destruction of
the natural environment (Nausicaa) or via
the inevitable separation of spheres born
of urbanization and modernity (Spirited
Away).

Rather than a convention of covert creolization, Miyazaki’s broadening appeal is

located in the creation of a hybrid Japanese ‘modern myth’ that is accessible (in different
ways) to post-industrialized audiences all over the world. ‘Nausicaa’ exemplifies the kind of
‘globalizing’ of storytelling that is intrinsic to his work.

human emotion and accessible to mortal
communication. The Japanese character-
ize this relationship in terms of oya-ko: as
ancestor to descendent or parent to child.
One of Miyazaki’s most celebrated films
in Japan, My Neighbour Totoro (1988),
exemplifies the benevolent relationship
that can be enjoyed between the kami
and humans. Through their pre-intellectual
between this world and an alternative
perfect realm, but instead emphasizes that
intuitive spirituality facilitates the fusion
and equilibrium of all realms. The nature of
humanity is considered essentially good,
and pure evil does not stain the soul, it
only obscures its true nature temporarily.
Conceptualizing continuity between man
and nature, Shinto views humankind in
harmonious accord with the wider ecosys-
Nausicaa: In Awe of the Natural
World
In the thirtieth century world of Nausicaa,
the world has been destroyed in a human-
inflicted holocaust called The Seven Days
of Fire. Yet, instead of a dry, radioactive
wasteland, the lands are abundant with
life. Toxins have caused widespread plant
and insect mutations and a giant breed

Metro Magazine No. 143 • 49

of insectoid called Ohmu rule the planet.
Simultaneously, a new ecosystem evolves
that is poisonous to humans, variously
called the Sea of Corruption, the Toxic
Jungle, the Acid Sea and the Wasteland. It
is the humans who must now adapt to the
by-products of a different species. This
kind of ecological influence is apparent
in Nausicaa’s many symbolic moments,
which, as Wells suggests, ‘become the
locus for narrational emphasis and the
nexus of spiritual and philosophic ideas’.8
As well as carrying the trope of the mes-
siah, the character of the princess embod-
ies certain ideas about how to live with the
natural world. Her characterization can be
read as signifying transitional and purify-
ing aspects, and the unusual power she
possesses as affirmative of the ‘rightness’
of her mode of thought.
One of the few remaining refuges of
humanity is Nausicaa’s home in the Val-
ley of the Wind. Ocean breezes keep the
Valley free of toxic spores and enable a
small, pastoral community to live a semi-
feudal life. With its windmills, castle and
cultivated grapes, the Valley connotes a
pre-modern idyll. The people present as
friendly and good-hearted in their hearty
greetings to one another and their concern
for the princess. They stand in contrast to
the warring states of Torumekia and Pejite:
where the Valley folk are agrarian and gen-
tle, the other states are violent and cling to
their militaristic way of life. When the Val-
ley has been invaded and occupied by the
Torumekians, one Valley man says to the
Commander: ‘You use fire. We use a little
of that too, but too much fire gives birth to
nothing. Fire turns a forest to ash in one
day. Water and wind take a hundred years
to nurture a forest. We prefer water and
wind.’ In this juxtaposition of high-tech
weaponry and the simple life of the Valley,
the latter is clearly privileged as the more
desirable community and settlement.
Nausicaa takes a scientific and beatific
interest in the forest and joyfully uncov-
ers the complexity of her surroundings.
In a secret laboratory, she grows spores
collected from the Jungle and discov-
ers that, given clean water and soil, the
fungi and plants do not give off poisonous
vapours—it is the soil that is toxic, not the
plants that grow in it. When she discov-
ers this, she asks, ‘Who could have done
50 • Metro Magazine No. 143
this to the world?’ in a tone not of disgust
but of naïve incredulity. She is in effect
asking why anyone would act to create
disharmony in the world. Later, after an
aerial battle, she crash-lands in the jungle
and finds herself, along with a Pejite boy
she was trying to save, in a subterranean
cavern of clean water and non-toxic
sands. They realize that the entire forest
operates as a purifying organism; the trees
absorb the poisons from the soil, crystal-
lize and neutralize them, before eventually
dissolving into sand. The Toxic Jungle is
effectively purifying the planet, a task the
scattered humans are unable to do. In
Nausicaa, pollution comes not from the re-
versal of power relations between humans
and insects, but in the interruption to the
continuity of nature by humans placing
themselves outside of the natural order.
The character of Nausicaa physically
moves between the insect realm of the
Jungle and the human world of the Valley
of the Wind—in fact, her liminality serves
to merge the two. Like an emergent
lifeform, Nausicaa has evolved to com-
municate with the now-dominant insects.
Besides her mentor Master Yupa, she is
the only one of the Valley folk to venture
from the safety of the Valley. This intuitive
talent sets her apart from the other hu-
mans, despite her love and protection of
them, and empowers her as a harmonizing
agent. Nausicaa leads the Valley not into
the restoration of an old way of life, but
into a new mode of survival in contact with
the Toxic Jungle.
The Ohmu, aware of the purifying func-
tion of the forest, act to defend it from the
actions of humans. They are a god-like
race, intricately connected to the new
ecosystem and able to telepathically feel
the pain of all creatures in the Jungle, not
just their own kind. Despite suffering from
the aggression of the Torumekians and
Pejites, the Ohmu are not vengeful—but
seek to restore the balance. Nausicaa’s
grandmother, the sage of the Valley, wisely
sees this when she whispers; ‘The anger
of the Ohmu is the anger of the earth’ and
later ‘what sympathy they possess …’
The Ohmu acknowledge the sacrifices
Nausicaa makes, and seem aware of
their shared purpose. They embody, like
Nausicaa, the core idea of Shinto—that
the natural world will relentlessly find
equilibrium, reconciling and harmonizing
extremes.
Spirited Away: Rediscovering
the Spiritual
In his most recent film, Spirited Away,
Miyazaki takes a more contemporary look
at the spiritual life of Japan. Instead of
a war between gods and humans, this
time Miyazaki examines how folk beliefs
of Shinto can be integrated into modern
lives. Like many other girls her age, petu-
lant ten-year-old Chihiro knows little about
her cultural heritage, and while Miyazaki
doesn’t set out to educate children, he
would like ‘[young audiences] to be in the
movie theatre with a sense of humility
about the complexity and difficulty of the
world that we live in’.9 But he is adamant
about avoiding Disney techniques, such
as simplifying the world for children: ‘To
make a true children’s film is a real daunt-
ing challenge and this is because we need
to clearly portray the essence of a very
complex world.’10 This includes sharing
with them his kindly worldview that is
expressed symbolically through Shinto.
Shinto and the kami play a very prominent
role in this film. At the beginning, as Chihi-
ro and her parents get themselves lost on
the way to their new home, Chihiro notices
a grinning statue by the side of the road.
Surrounded by tiny stone houses ‘where
spirits live’, the squat statue seems to leer
and grimace at her, however it is closely
modelled on Douso-jin—a roadside Shinto
deity and protector of travellers. Statues of
this deity were often put at the boundary
of a village or at crossroads to indicate the
right direction. This metaphor-heavy place
symbolically marks the family’s movement
from the known to the unknown. The old
torii gate leaning against a tall camphor
tree also offers the subtext of passage
from the secular into the sacred. Chihiro’s
initial fear of this ancient statue and her
reluctance to join her parents as they ex-
plore the strange area they have stumbled
into is borne from her unfamiliarity with
these supposedly reassuring objects.
A little later, after Chihiro’s parents have
succumbed to greed and a spell turning
them into pigs, Chihiro watches awe-
struck as the way home is now filled with
water and a brightly lit barge arrives on
the banks. The barge seems initially to
be empty, but then hundreds of float-
ing paper masks emerge and the gods’
ghostly forms materialize behind them.
The masks, called zoumen, have been
described as similar to those that Ama
dancers wear. Ama is an ancient form
of Japanese dance that is performed at
Shinto shrines as well as at the Imperial
palace.
Thus there are many elements of the mise-
en-scéne that are Shinto-inspired—includ-
ing offerings of salt, the use of white to
indicate the presence of magic, death or
kami, and purification by water. However
the overriding idea in the film seems to be
that the kami are continuing to live along-
side humans. It is not the case that the
kami have been killed off by the rational
thought of modernization. A number of
anthropologists have subscribed to this
myth of secularization in industrialized
societies, epitomized in Max Weber’s
‘disenchantment’ theory.11 What Miyazaki
has attempted here is to re-enchant his
modern, often very young, audiences by
transforming and re-presenting the time-
less ideas and practices of Shinto.
When Chihiro and her family initially stum-
ble into this magical realm they think it is
an abandoned theme park. Full of colour
and intriguingly ancient architecture, it
stands empty and forgotten. ‘They built so
many of them’, explains Chihiro’s father.
By mistaking the kami realm for a man-
made construction, Shinto itself could be
metaphorically read to be an abandoned
theme park, an antiquated oddity. But
when they enter this magical realm, im-
mediately life is breathed back into it. As
if just by being present, they are suddenly
able to see the spirits that live there.
The local gods in Japan have proved
much more resilient than originally
thought. We can see this when Chi-
hiro (now called ‘Sen’, as the bathhouse
proprietess Yubaba has stolen her name)
rescues the Stink God. Miyazaki describes
his inspiration for this scene, which is
almost exactly what happens in the film:
No, it doesn’t come from mythology, but
from my own experience. There is a river
close to where I live in the countryside.
When they cleaned the river we got to see
what was at the bottom of it, which was
truly putrid. In the river there was a bicycle
with its wheel sticking out above the sur-
face of the water. So they thought it would
be easy to pull out, but it was terribly
difficult because it had become so heavy
from all the dirt it had collected over the
years. Now they’ve managed to clean up
the river, the fish are slowly returning to it,
so all is not lost. But the smell of what they
dug up was really awful. Everyone had just
been throwing stuff into that river over the
years, so it was an absolute mess.
Hayao Miyazaki12
Sen is pushed forward to undertake the
task of helping the Stink God with his
bath. She does so courageously and
discovers that he has a ‘thorn’ in his side.
When Yubaba hears this, she rallies all the
workers to help Sen pull out the offend-
ing object. It turns out to be the handle of
a bicycle and heaving it loose unleashes
a flood of appliances and debris: fridges,
old microwaves, the junk of modern life.
But finally, the radiant, dynamic form of a
River God is revealed and, enveloping Sen
in a bubble of water, his wizened, wood-
en-masked face thanks her. He also gives
her a ball of bitter material that seems to
contain self-knowledge.
The theme of self-knowledge is integral
to the narrative, as it is the key to her
love for Haku that facilitates her return
to normalcy. Sen realizes that she has
met Haku before, and that his presence
here is due to events in the ‘real’ world.
She says, finally understanding: ‘I don’t
remember it but my mum told me. Once
when I was little I fell into a river. She said
they drained it and built things on top, but
I’ve just remembered. The river was called
… its name was the Kohaku River. Your
real name is Kohaku.’ Filling in rivers is a
common practice in Japan where space is
a rare commodity. Yet perhaps the result
of that action is that Haku is stuck in
Yubaba’s clutches, as he seeks to regain
knowledge of who he is and his true
name. This knowledge comes to Sen after
her contact with the natural world. The film
gently suggests that children, and adults,
can benefit from Shinto’s typically word-
less communion with nature even amidst
the abstractions of the modern world.
Both Nausicaa and Spirited Away privilege
humanity’s return to an intuitive relation-
ship with the natural world as revered by
Shinto—a message that has endeared
Miyazaki’s animated worlds to Japanese
and increasingly global audiences.
This article has been refereed.
Lucy Wright is a Ph.D. candidate at Mel-
bourne University, and recently completed
a Masters project at RMIT University on
Hayao Miyazaki’s anime and Shinto.
Jerry Clode lectures in Asian Media and
Culture at the School of Applied Communi-
cation, RMIT University. •
Endnotes
1
David Goldsmith, ‘An interview with Hayao
Miyazaki’ in Mononoke-hime Theater Program,
translated by Ryoko Toyama, July 1997, www.
nausicaa,net/miyazaki/interviews/m_on_
mh.html. Accessed 15 May 2003.
2
Douglas McGray, ‘Japan’s Gross Domestic
Cool’, Foreign Policy, June/July 2002, pp.45-
54.
3
Kochi Iwabuchi, ‘From Western Gaze to Global
Gaze: Japanese cultural presence in Asia’ in
Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy and Globali-
zation, Crane et al. (eds), Routledge, New York,
2002, pp.258-260.
4
ibid, p. 258.
5
Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess
Mononoke, Palgrave, New York, 2000, pp.132-
35.
6
Paul Wells, ‘Hayao Miyazaki: Floating worlds,
floating signifiers’, Art + Design, vol. 32, no. 9,
November 2001, p.23.
7
David Chute, ‘Organic Machine: The World of
Hayao Miyazaki’, Film Comment, vol. 34 (6),
November/December 1998, p.64.
8
Wells, op cit., p.23.
9
Mark Vallen & Jeannine Thorpe, ‘Spirited Away:
Miyazaki at the Hollywood Premiere’, The
Black Moon, 13 September, www.theblack-
moon.com/deadmoon/spiritedaway.html.
Accessed 10 March 2003.
10
ibid.
11
Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans-
lated by E. Fischoff, Methuen & Co, London,
1965.
12
Tom Mes, ‘Hayao Miyazaki Interview’, Midnight
Eye, July 1, 2002, www.midnighteye.com/in-
terviews/hayao_miyazaki.shtml. Accessed 12
May 2003.
Metro Magazine No. 143 • 51