Miyazaki’s Heroines: The Call of Hayao Miyazaki’s Feminism
Surely you have heard about Hayao Miyazaki, the pioneer of Japanese manga and the “Walt Disney” behind Studio Ghibli. Spirited Away, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle — his films seem to endure, even prosper, while others fade away (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, anyone?). Integral to this staying power is how Miyazaki portrays his characters; there’s a tone of humanity in his films that stands above and apart from anything else.
And central to Miyazaki’s mythos is how great power corrupts.
For Hayao Miyazaki, it is absolute power that is responsible for instigating conflict, intensifying war and bloodshed onto innocents already struggling in an imperfect society. Miyazaki’s films integrally tie feminism with environmental justice and pacifism, powerfully demonstrating that the pursuit of power, in all forms, is inherently corruptible and mutable — that the subjugation of women fundamentally spreads to the subjugation of the environment and to the horrors of war. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail, and which Hayao Miyazaki would surely agree with, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
It’s impossible to begin examining Miyazaki’s philosophy without first examining the moral realism embedded in his art. In Miyazaki’s stories, few characters can be described as outright “villainous” in the Hollywood sense — more often then not Miyazaki creates antagonists, and never unsympathetic antagonists at that. The heroes of his stories are always innocents caught in the middle of the conflict these antagonists inadvertently create.
Miyazaki’s antagonists, for instance, always begin well-intentioned, but become possessed by an insatiable lust for power, or begin to profit from the subjugation and enslavement of others. From this perspective, Miyazaki’s antagonists can be viewed as theatrically tragic, because each one is uniquely possessed by a fatal flaw that dooms them towards oppression and cruelty — most commonly a lust for power, as illustrated through Muska of Castle in the Sky and Suliman of Howl’s Moving Castle. These powerful figures, the clearest “evil” characters in Miyazaki’s repetire, originally used their positions for good, but become obsessed with further power and control. The heroes do not kill these antagonists — they attempt to escape, and when that fails, they destroy the powerful weapons the antagonists seek, in order to stop further conflict.
It is this motif — the destruction of genocidal weapons — that ties together four of Miyazaki’s greatest films: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and Howl’s Moving Castle. In each film, a powerful man or woman is instigating conflict to gain control over a great weapon — in Nausicaa, it is the Giant Warrior; in Castle in the Sky, it is the floating city and its robot soldiers; in Mononoke it is the head of the Forest Spirit; in Howl’s Moving Castle it is Howl himself. And in all four films this great weapon must be destroyed or removed so that its power does not fall into anyone’s hands, no matter who it is. Indeed, the antagonists who seek this great weapon are shown to be unable to control it, or unable to stop the chaos that results from unleashing it; and it is up to the heroines to return balance to the world, to rebuild.
Miyazaki here notably draws from Japan’s post-WWII ethos. As the masculine militarism of Imperial Japan died with the devastation of the Second World War, it was the soldiers’ widows who rebuilt from the literal ashes of their husbands. The antagonists of these stories do not care how many innocents die to achieve their goals of ultimate power over their enemies — even at the cost of their own health, sanity, and lives. Imperial Japan’s Bonsai suicide pilots come to mind. The corruption of absolute power is clear to Miyazaki, and it visibly has consequences on all characters, good and bad, in his films — especially harming the women.
Indeed, Miyazaki also frames his stories so the women are the Christ-figures who sacrifice themselves for their causes — whether it be Nausicaa, Sheeta, Mononoke, Eboshi, or Sophie, each and every one of these heroines attempts to sacrifice herself for her people and for needless violence to end. Nausicaa sacrifices herself into the herd of rampaging Ohmu, giant bug-like creatures, after the warlike Pejite civilization literally crucifies a baby Ohmu and uses its cries to draw out the fury of the creatures to destroy their enemies. This is the same civilization, notably, that sacrificed their own city for the same purposes — the leadership let it be devoured by rampaging beasts, killing thousands of innocents, just to win a battle. Sheeta, on the other hand, sacrifices her birthright as Queen of a flying city in order to destroy the massive annihilating power it carries. Mononoke sacrifices herself to save her forest; Eboshi sacrifices herself for her people; Sophie sacrifices herself to save Howl. These heroines are powerful, not just because of their idealism, but for their courage that nobody else seems to find within — a willingness to stand in the face of injustice and resist.
This drive — a wholehearted desire to liberate the people they love from bondage — is not only shared by Miyazaki’s heroines, but by his female antagonists as well. Everyone in Miyazaki’s films is a victim to multiple forms of oppression, regardless of their position. In Spirited Away, for instance, there is no clear antagonist in Yubaba’s bathhouse but the capitalist system Yubaba perpetuates — a world of excess, of cheap plastic toys and poor labor conditions, where Chihiro, our heroine, has to sign her entire identity away to Yubaba in order to physically survive; a world where her parents are literally turned into pigs for not respecting the kami’s food. If she does not literally eat from the capitalist world, she becomes invisible, eventually vanishing into nothing — a metaphor for how we must constantly, constantly keep consuming more and more in order to simply be visible in our modern society.
For it is Miyazaki’s female antagonists — Lady Eboshi of Princess Mononoke, Princess Kushana of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and even Yubaba of Spirited Away — who are shown to be especially redeemable because they are just as much victims as they are perpetrators of conflict, whether it be against the environment (Lady Eboshi), through war (Princess Kushana), or through capitalism (Yubaba). Lady Eboshi is an especially pertinent case because, in destroying the environment around her Irontown, she is simply trying to secure the freedom of her people, people who have been shunned by normal society — lepers and prostitutes. She is just as much a heroine as Princess Mononoke, her mortal enemy, is. For Kushana of Nausicaa, her armor is a physical reminder of the horrors war wrought upon her body — it hides the scars and missing limbs she is so desperate to cover, but also reinforces how she must continue her militarist conquest of rival kingdoms, or risk having a less competent man replace her and ruin the work she has done for her people. For Yubaba, her materialist bathhouse has distanced her from her twin sister, Zeniba — the capitalism of post-WWII Japan has left her cruel and merciless, treating Chihiro like yet another labor slave, as she constantly tricks her employees into working for her forever — as an example, at the end of Spirited Away, Yubaba agrees to release Chihiro if she can identify which of the pigs in front of her are her parents. None are.
These heroines are also significant because they are not defined by men. “Many of my movies have strong female leads — brave, self-sufficient girls that don’t think twice about fighting for what they believe in with all their heart,” said Miyazaki on the subject. “They’ll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man.” They’ll need a friend, a supporter, but never a savior. Indeed, the men and boys who support Miyazaki’s heroines often serve little purpose other than comedy, being put in line by the more-capable female leads. The men who are closer to the heroines — Pazu of Castle in the Sky and Ashitaka of Mononoke — play a larger role, but still secondary to their heroine — they are not love interests of the main female leads, at least not in the traditional sense. These men fight so that the world understands their heroines; and they, too, sacrifice themselves for their heroines’ benefit, creating a profoundly different female:male dynamic than that present in Western media.
The men perpetrating the oppression that the heroines fight against, on the other hand, are presented as proud, vainglorious, and buffoonish caricatures — the King in Howl’s Moving Castle is all but a puppet to the powerful sorceress Suliman; some have (hilariously) related this character to George W. Bush (Miyazaki famously hated the Iraq War — he boycotted the 75th Academy Awards because he “didn’t want to visit a country that was bombing Iraq”). Kurotowa, Kushana’s advisor in Nausicaa, perpetuates the growth of the Giant Warrior, the ancient weapon, but is timid and cowardly in person; Gonza, Eboshi’s bodyguard in Mononoke, acts tough but is extremely dull; the list goes on. These male supporting characters all share a type: proud, boastful males who emphasize their masculinity, only to be emasculated by their more capable female counterparts.
We call Miyazaki’s women heroines, not because they are Disney princesses; we call them heroines because they are wholeheartedly willing to die for the causes they fight for. They don’t walk demurely with birds on their shoulders, or wait for men to plan their battles — each and every one of them is shown doing hard, capable work, or go to war with blood painted on their faces. And therein lies the fundamental distinction between Miyazaki’s “Eastern” philosophy and our Western expectations of women — Miyazaki’s definition of a hero is functional. He deeply understands that in an unjust system, removing an oppressor will simply lead to another in his place; that the entire system must be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, like how Irontown must burn down as a result of their hubris, or how the world of Nausicaa must learn how to live in harmony with their environment.
Miyazaki’s heroines are living examples of how the oppression of women carries over to the environment and to the state; how one form of injustice is intricately tied to others, and how those most affected can fight. Most importantly, Miyazaki’s heroines show that strength and courage is difficult, but always possible, in an imperfect world — that the dreams we dream to make life worth living are worth dying for.
References
Denham, Jess (7 June 2016). “Studio Ghibli hires male directors because they have a ‘more idealistic’ approach to fantasy than women”. The Independent. Archived from the original on 24 June 2017. Retrieved 5 June 2017.
Feminism, ecology and anti-fascism: Four jewels of ‘japanese disney’. CE Noticias Financieras. Retrieved from http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/wire-feeds/feminism-ecology-anti-fascism-four-jewels/docview/2368497670/se-2?accountid=14244
King, M. L., Jr. (1994). Letter from the Birmingham jail. Harper San Francisco.
Kono, S. Did Spirited Away Dream of Third-Wave Feminism?.
Letko, P. (2019). The Strong Shojo: Hayao Miyazaki’s Feminist Characters in Cultural Context.
Trafí-Prats, L. (2017). Girls’ Aesthetics of Existence in/With Hayao Miyazaki’s Films. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(5), 376–383. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616674996
