Spirited Away, the animation film from 2002, was the first Japanese feature to win both an Oscar and a Golden Bear Award from the Berlin Film Festival. The film is centered around Chihiro, a ten-year old girl who loses her parents and accidentally enters a world of mythical creatures. To survive, she needs to work in a bath house run by an old witch called Yobaba. The various gods and spirits come here to bath and rest and Chihiro is employed under her new name: Sen. The film follows the heroine as she tries to escape and find her parents, with the help of other workers and her mysterious new friend Haku.
Ghibli, the studio which has created the movie, has distributed its films long before Spirited Away, but never before has one of their films been so popular abroad. As a company, Ghibli studios’ strategy overlaps the most with the definition of an international strategy. The films that Ghibli produces are created for the Japanese domestic market, but are subsequently sold abroad. The knowledge and skills remain in Japan however, which is made possible by the easy digital reproduction that is inherent to film. By selling the copyrights to other corporations, such as Disney, international distribution is made possible with little interference from Ghibli. One could even say, that when producing a new movie, Ghibli is already assuming it will be watched abroad too. (Disney is just one of the major western companies seeking to make a profit out of Japanese products. Disney bought the American rights to Hayao Miyazaki’s films (such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke), so as to be able to dub these films with the voices of American actors as well as to distribute these films more widely, especially in the west.)
Hidden meaning
At first glance, Spirited Away has no political dimension, as is expected of most animation films for children: it might be viewed as a form of uncritical populism as formulated by McGuigan. However, at second glance, this assumption is not correct. One very popular theory among fans is that the story of Spirited Away is actually an analogy of the sex industry. “The entire movie is a metaphor for prostitution” is written on FanTheoriesWiki[1], a claim which is supposedly supported by the director of the film, Hayao Miyazaki: “I think the most appropriate way to symbolize the modern world is the sex industry. Hasn’t Japanese society become like the sex industry?”.[2]
The clues for this ‘hidden story’ are subtle but evident. During the Edo period in Japan, bath houses were basically brothels. The women who worked here were known as ‘yuna’, which is also the description for Chihiro’s job in the movie. The brothel madams in those days were referred to as Yubaba, which is also the name of the evil witch in the motion picture. Furthermore, Chihiro gets a new name from Yubaba before she goes to work, which is Sen. It was common for prostitutes to adopt a different name while working, so this too seems too precise to be a coincidence.[3] If true, this form of criticism might fall under McGuigan’s notion of a critical intervention, even though it might be too subtle for that. It is interesting that even though a lot of viewers of Spirited Away are not familiar with Japanese history or context, there is still an audience who actively reads and participates in the debates regarding meaning. Does this mean that the meaning is no longer bound to the Japanese market? Or is it still perceived slightly differently abroad?
The West
When we think of giving meaning to the film Spirited Away, and the difference in giving meaning between its ‘homeland’ Japan and other countries, it is imporant to adress the notion of the otaku. “Otaku” is a Japanese term that makes fun of fans that have become obsessive consumers of popular culture and thus have lost touch with reality and those people in their personal lives. Basically die-hard comic-con type fans that live and breathe popular culture. A lot of fans of Japanese contemporary culture outside of Japan have playfully adapted the term to refer to themselves. Otaku can either be what Hannerz argues: “individuals pick from other cultures only those pieces that suit himself”. However, “the cosmopolitan does not make distinctions among the particular elements of the alien culture in order to admit some of them into his repertoire and refuses others, the cosmopolitan does not negotiate with the other culture but accepts it as a package deal”. Cosmopolitianism is at best an escape from narrow-mindedness (paroachialism) and isolationism. It offers us an awareness and an alternative vantage point.[5] This changes the way we look at the film.
Thanks to these ‘otakus’ perhaps, Japanese culture has found its entry into the West since the 80s. As an effect, there is a considerable amount of people in the Netherlands, for example, who recognize and know symbols or characteristics of Japanese (contemporary) culture. This kind of knowledge changes the way meaning is given to the film: a more hybrid form of meaning giving perhaps, a marriage between the western point of view and the Japanese point of view.
Another suggested reading
Spirited Away in itself is a clash between the ‘new’ and the ‘traditional’ of the ‘east’ and the ‘west’. Chihiro is the embodiment of the modern or the west battling the traditional and elements of the east. Her parents are seen driving a very detailed Audi and she is seen being a snotty gadget loving girl from the big city. Thus the movie creates a boundary between globalised and Americanised culture and the traditional over the top Japanese culture. The new is seen as being technological, consumerist Japan (also evident in the consumption expressed by one of the greedy characters in the film)/ McKay (1997) says that technology has “come to dominate our iconography of (American) modernity”.
As Chihiro becomes Sen it is evident that she has had to abandon her western ways in order to find back the things that are most important to her (her freedom and her parents). This could be a play on society in Japan needing to abandon aspects of the west, gaining back its traditional self so as to find back the things that are most important to Japanese culture, tradition [4].
Spirited Away can be seen as a Japanese approach to many of today’s modern problems despite the fact that it is set in a very traditional Japanese setting. Globalisation, the sex trade, our need to fit into society and striving to find the truth or those things that truly matter to us are all aspects that the movie goes into. Japanese films and series do have a way of making us, as westerners, get “Spirited Away”.
[1] http://fantheories.wikia.com/wiki/Spirited_Away
[3] http://kurisushi.tumblr.com/post/7222106306/spirited-away-and-back-story
[5] http://convergenceculture.org/newsletters/2007/03/march_30_2007.php
Stevens' Media Mythbusters 