{"id":25,"date":"2016-10-14T22:42:40","date_gmt":"2016-10-15T02:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/?p=25"},"modified":"2016-10-16T17:02:30","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T21:02:30","slug":"a-dispiriting-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/uncategorized\/a-dispiriting-tale\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dispiriting Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

My adolescence has been long haunted by sensations that I will never know: the bliss of biting into a dumpling made of whipped clouds, the warmth of jasmine bath waters, the serenity of a solitary train traversing a glass sea. <\/span><\/p>\n

For these moments of unattainable euphoria I have to thank Hayao Miyazaki, esteemed director of animated classic, \u201cSpirited Away.\u201d Sensory snapshots like these, communicated through breathtaking imagery, are at once imagined and impossibly real\u2014the mark of true fantasy. The film\u2019s most arresting scenes are the transitional ones, the bits of stillness in between action, like the image of a placid lake cut effortlessly by a crossing train. The water is massless and unbounded, and the train\u2019s motion is smooth. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"a

a stunning landscape<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s the lake\u2019s sheerness that captivates us, and we catch glimpses of it in clouds, smoke plumes, or the redundant windows of city offices. We carry Miyazaki\u2019s illustrations throughout our daily lives, animating mundane routines like eating, bathing, even riding public transportation with cinematic wonder and sublimity.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a movie you cannot forget, and one you long to relive in daily performance. As we return to our cubicles and screens, we wish the harsh florescent strips to be replaced with lanterns, bulbous and secretive. We imagine them emitting a haze that feels and looks second-hand, with the gentleness of a childhood nightlight, far gone and packed up in cardboard boxes. Suddenly, we\u00a0are returned the scene of awakening spirits. Red lamps stir and awaken as shadows wander the festival streets.\u00a0Slowly, we follow\u00a0the movie\u2019s heroin, a young girl named Chihiro as she explores the\u00a0empty festival soon to be enjoyed by the gods.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"spirited_away_03_alone_with_the_spirits\"<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s a film\u00a0that has been praised for it\u2019s mastery of fantasy<\/i>: it makes us feel things that are wholly otherworldly. It takes us to places and elicits sensations and emotions that are extra-human, and then prompts us to infuse them in every day life. Partly because\u00a0it is so visually stimulating, the movie transcends the limitations of a target audience. Children and adults, homesick college students and their nostalgic professors, citizens of all nationalities and speakers of all languages alike have cherished the movie and its experience. But despite its success and reach, the narrative is structured around a relentless and multi-faceted moral statement, which is a rarity amongst popular cinema. (It is incredibly rare to find a cultural artifact accepted and popularized by mainstream media that is not forwarding a destructive ideology, but instead works to consciously undermine one.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Most obviously, the movie holds humans accountable for their constant mistreatment of the natural environment, and it criticizes gluttony and greed. None can deny the underlying currents of environmentalism. We all remember the stink monster that enters the bathhouse, and when cleaned, is discovered\u00a0to be a feeble river spirit. Chihiro undoubtedly leaves the bathhouse having learned lessons in hard work, obedience and the repercussions of avarice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The

The disgusting stink monster<\/p><\/div>\n

\"A

A bicycle is pulled from the stink monster’s side, unleashing a heap of trash<\/p><\/div>\n

\"A

A river god emerges and thanks Chihiro for her service<\/p><\/div>\n

But as my phrasing suggests, these conclusions are glaringly obvious. I reject the movie\u2019s hook to be its fantasy, or any surface-level motif. To forward either as the main thrust of the film is to underestimate or\u00a0disrespect the subtlety of Miyazaki\u2019s writing. In truth, the film evokes themes far more insidious, far more trenchant, and far less recognizable. I assert that this movie contains incisive political threads, that are deeply rooted in its narrative and wholly involved with the cultural context of Japan\u00a0at the time of cinematic\u00a0production.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is difficult to discern, and what will be the focus of this essay, is how the movie hints at the grisly pervasiveness of child trafficking in Japanese contemporary culture and history. The movie, stripped of its aesthetic beauty and child-like wonder and viewed through t<\/span>he eyes of a conscious citizen, is the story a young girl forced into prostitution by the greed and piggishness of her parents, a chilling and all-too-common tale. Thus, a movie especially adored by children for its splendor reveals itself to be a commentary on child prostitution. <\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s break it down. The essence of the film lies in its dual premise. Conflict stems from the fluid interaction between two worlds: spirit, and human. In both realms alike, the good and the bad dwell together. The presumed oppressors of each sphere are not fully evil, just like the heroin is intrinsically flawed. <\/span><\/p>\n

To continue it will be necessary to elucidate the dynamic roles of good and bad, starting with the human realm:<\/span><\/p>\n

Human world:<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The bad: The movie opens on Chihiro\u2019s family moving\u00a0across the countryside of Japan. Immediately, Chihiro strikes us as annoying and puerile\u2014 the typical trope of the whiny 12-year-old girl whose softie parents have spoiled her all her life.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\n
    \"An

    An apathetic Chihiro in the back seat of the car<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"Very

    Very mature, clearly<\/p><\/div><\/li>\n

  2. The good: In contrast, her parents are portrayed as calm and patient, persuasive but not bossy. The mother\u2019s voice is soothing and sympathetic, the father\u2019s, assured and playful. <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    When the parents pull over to explore a side road, Chihiro is cowardly and uncooperative, while her parents are curious and adventurous (remarkably so, given that they have a pre-teen daughter). As the parents venture through the gates that separate the two worlds, their calm demeanors paint Chichiro as needlessly nervous.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Chihiro

    Chihiro stubbornly\u00a0nags\u00a0her parents to come back<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"Her

    They\u00a0tell her to wait in the car if she doesn’t want to come<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"She

    She eventually follows, but clings to her mother’s arm<\/p><\/div>\n

    The parents sit down to sample a buffet, unknowing it has been reserved for the gods. If you\u2019ve seen the film, you know this to be the screaming moment, when you want to throw your popcorn at the computer and warn the parents of the evil in those dumplings\u2014 satan in a sac of dough. But even to the knowing audience, the food is made to look so tempting, the chicken, so tender as it droops delicately from the father\u2019s chopstick that we can\u2019t blame the parents for their actions. In fact, many of us would choose those juicy chunks of ambiguous poultry over any of our own whining children, sisters or next-door neighbors.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Yumm!\"

    yum<\/p><\/div>\n

    Meanwhile, Chihiro tensely bunches the bottom\u00a0of her shirt, expressing her worry that they\u2019ll get it trouble. Dad responds, “Don\u2019t worry, you\u2019ve got daddy here. He\u2019s got credit cards and cash!\u201d as he fills three heaping plates with food. She pleads for them to stop with the desperation of a desperate toddler in want of a sweet. And that truly is what Chihiro sounds like: a toddler. In a visual work where actors are replaced with drawings, the intonation and quality of the voiceovers carry incredible weight. Where we are unable to decipher emotion in the subtleties of facial expression\u2014animation can only be so precise\u2014we can in the characters\u2019 voices. We can sense tenderness and innocence in their cadences, levity in their lilts. And Chihiro sounds like a whiny rascal of a child.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"still

    still yum<\/p><\/div>\n

    The parents ignore her protests and eat the food. Suddenly, they morph into pigs with disturbing human features (pig-dad retains his buzz cut and the pig-mom has her purse, still) and we realize this scene to be the fulcrum of the film\u2019s conflict: the separation of Chihiro from her parents. Left all alone, Chihiro is forced to find a job at a\u00a0bathhouse in order to survive as a human in the spirit world, and the rest of the movie progresses as she works\u00a0to rescue her family. <\/span><\/p>\n

    In retrospect, the image of the parents\u2019 pig-ification and those leading to it are wildly important: they symbolize the enslavement of Chihiro due to the gluttony and negligence of her parents. With or without realizing it, the parents sell their daughter into slavery for a few divine dumplings. <\/span><\/p>\n

    But the real kicker here is that Chihiro is not<\/em> the helpless girl sold into slave labor by her greedy parents\u2014 rather, she is the whiny, hyper-sensitive child. The parents are the unassuming, innocent adventurers driven by opportunistic hunger. So the movie forces us to sympathize with them<\/em> in the situation of Chihiro\u2019s abandonment. (After all, we\u2019ve all been tempted by that steaming plate of noodles before.) In fact, the moment is made to be so banal, and the parents\u2019 actions, so understandable that we ourselves enact the indirect selling of our daughter into slavery.<\/span><\/p>\n

    What should be a moment of betrayal and abandonment becomes something of understandable coincidence: The parents just ate the food and then turned into pigs. And then Chihiro was left alone in a foreign world, forced to relinquish her name and free-will to the ruler of the bathhouse. It sort-of just happened. No ill-will involved. In simple terms, the effect of this situation is to normalize the circumstance of a child trapped in physical slave labor.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Going one step further, this scene does more than make Chihiro\u2019s abandonment palatable to the viewer. It does more than absolve the parents of blame. The effect\u2014by making Chihiro intolerably annoying, with a pouting grimace and a high-pitched, head-ache-inducing whine\u2014is to make us believe Chihiro deserving of her predicament. It is\u00a0to make us thankful for her enslavement, for her silencing. We are made to prefer her quiet whimpers to screaming protests.<\/span><\/p>\n

    While this is itself disturbing enough, the situation is complicated when we observe Chihiro\u2019s response to her abandonment and how her actions are portrayed. She learns to scrub floors, deliver water tokens, greet customers. She learns discipline and tenacity. She braves flying paper monsters, scales the exterior of the bathhouse, runs along rusty pipes, and confronts a witch-like antagonist who’s giant face holds enough wrinkles for a small child to get lost in. She learns courage. She finds comfort in fellow bathhouse maids, learning camaraderie and trust. But by far the most persistent motif, she denies constant bribes from a lonely spirit called \u201cNo Face.\u201d At every turn of the story, she declines money, treasure, toys, feasts. So, she rejects capitalism and materialism but endures forced physical labor. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Chihiro\u2019s survival tale teaches viewers to value discipline, courage and hard work over greed. In Miyazaki\u2019s own words, Chihiro \u201cmanages not because she has destroyed the ‘evil,’ but because she has acquired the ability to survive\u2026\u201d Thus, the film prompts young girls confronted with hardship, or left in isolation, to bear their strife with stoicism\u2014to endure it. Don\u2019t fight the evil, just do what you can to survive within your circumstances. In fact, Miyazaki praises the patience, and fortitude with which Chihiro accepts and submits to the labor she is forced into by her parents\u2019 overindulgence. Indeed, amusement is the spectacle of strife, and the fortitude with which the characters bear it placates us to our real-world struggles.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Sweeping

    The maids sweeping floors<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"and

    and cleaning out the baths<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"this\"

    and running across pipes<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"and

    and caring for injured dragons<\/p><\/div>\n

    Though my fondness for the movie will never fade, it is\u00a0difficult to see this story as one of mere slave labor when we are cognizant of Japan\u2019s history of prostitution and sex trafficking. The country\u2019s war-time narrative is marked by a painful, gut-wrenching report of sexual slavery. During WWII, hundreds of thousands of comfort girls were forced to service Japanese army camps, recruited through abduction or deceit, subjected to daily rape, and tortured if they disobeyed.<\/span> Even after the war, the Japanese government established facilities that provided organized prostitution to expats of Allied nations. When in 1958 Japan made explicit prostitution illegal, soaplands, or in Japanese, sopu<\/i> were designed for the men to be washed and sexually served by the female workers.<\/span> A popular theory amongst internet super-fans, there are subtle implications that the bathhouse is a guise for such a Japanese brothel. Seeing that the only westerner in the film is the bathhouse overlord, Yubaba, who forcibly employs young Japanese girls and robs them of their names and tips, it isn\u2019t unreasonable to view the house as an analogy for a Japanese whorehouse established apropos western occupation. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Given the resemblance between the bathhouse and the brothels of post-war Japan, we begin to remember the film\u2019s subtle allusions to sex labor, like when the maids laugh wantonly as their skirts puff up in the wind, or when Chihiro is trapped in an elevator with the Radish spirit, whose giant tentacles we can take to be giant phalluses and whose heavy panting makes our skin itch, or when Chihiro\u2019s name is contractually replaced upon employment, or the image of Chihiro pulling the single bicycle handle that has clogged the River God mistaken for a stink monster.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"The

    The girls run from the radish spirit<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"unfortunately

    unfortunately he catches up to them…<\/p><\/div>\n

    But then we remember the strange relationship between Sen (Chihiro renamed) and No Face, a gold-producing monster. No Face is a lonely spirit who persistently offers Sen nuggets of gold, plates of food, anything to win her friendship. Yet she\u00a0adamantly refuses all of his bribes. <\/span><\/p>\n

    \"No

    No face offering Chihiro gold<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"and

    and bath tokens<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"and

    and more gold<\/p><\/div>\n

    This is telling. Sen\u2019s genuine dislike of money starkly contrasts a conviction popular among Japan\u2019s sex workers of the 90\u2019s and early 2000\u2019s, when the movie was in the height of production. On the cusp of the 21st century, a new wave of media coverage exposed the fast proliferation of schoolgirl prostitutes in Tokyo (where the legal age of consent was 14 at the time).<\/span> Many\u00a0journalists maintained that the increase in pre-teen prostitutes, described as a growing epidemic, was not due to the symptoms of poverty but to a culture of rampant materialism. A 1996 article in the Wall Street Journal paints the schoolgirl prostitutes as apathetic, vapid and brand-obsessed, insinuating that girls in the 2000\u2019s began choosing prostitution to fund their expensive tastes for designer bags. This is a reality in direct contrast with images of war-time and post-war prostitution in the far east, which portray\u00a0the\u00a0battered \u00a0“Oriental\u201d girl, abandoned or sold off\u00a0by her parents and forced to subject her body to the white man.<\/span><\/p>\n

    So the movie, as a cultural artifact whose context matters, is vacillating between contrasting images of prostitution, namely, the faces of its old and new manifestations. On one hand, the film endorses a mindset that enables a traditional version of prostitution, where one finds the means to survive in the event of her parents\u2019 betrayal or death\u2014 where one endures suffering, rather than fighting larger evils. On the other hand,\u00a0it simultaneous criticizes an attitude that fueled channels of prostitution circa 1996, namely, that of the petty consumer.<\/span><\/p>\n

    The movie includes both a praise of gritty perseverance in the face of undeserved abandonment, and a criticism of materialism and greed. The young girl of the past, coerced or tricked into prostitution is portrayed as noble and admirable because she endures her situation with dignity, while the young girl of today, tempted into prostitution by the allure of bags and brand names is vain and selfish, like the very slobbering pig-demons that consume Chihiro\u2019s parents. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Prostitution is admirable when one is forced into it out of necessity, but wrong when one chooses it to fulfill her fate as a consumer. This is a movie about choice and the degrees of agency with which women conduct their bodies. <\/span><\/p>\n

    A more literal interpretation would uphold a bolder claim: Miyazaki is calling for a return to traditional prostitution with respect to its modern materialistic founding. He calls out the extravagance that is herding profligate girls into prostitution, and offers as its solution a revival of its older manifestation, wherein girls found the strength to survive in the face of adversity, where girls swallowed their pride and made not a single yen doing it. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    My adolescence has been long haunted by sensations that I will never know: the bliss of biting into a dumpling… Continue reading »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1345,"featured_media":104,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1345"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}