On Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi

16 November 2003
On Thursday we decided that (1) there should be another film, and (2) that it might be Spirited Away. I then voiced the question of HOW I was going to ...well... justify this as Anthropology, and I've spent a couple of days on the case, and learned some interesting things along the way, some of which shed interesting light on Anthropology 230 as a whole --as an enterprise for myself, as an opportunity for students, as an alternative to the conventional modes and objectives of courses. Putting aside the self-justificatory parts of my thinking, and concentrating instead on what we're actually doing with the materials of this and other weeks, I observe about 10 weeks of personal active engagement with information centered on the societies/cultures of East Asia, in which each TOPIC has led to others, and led me to explorations I wouldn't otherwise have undertaken. In various places I've likened this to a sort of intellectual macramé.

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi is an interesting example, and a worthy addition to the stimulus materials of the course, because there are successive levels of engagement that come out of the experience of watching it and considering its messages and relationships.

We might begin with its popularity, and observe that **anything that achieves such cultural notice/penetration just has to be SIGNIFICANT somehow, and our task as anthropological observers is to COMPREHEND that significance.
(N.B. that this cultural-significance hook has attracted us before: the cultural significance of the Chunhyang tale for Koreans, the Chushingura drama for Japanese, the Analects for all East Asians, and so on... these have been the focus of attention in various classes)
So we have a film that has supplanted Titanic as the highest-grossing film EVER in Japan... and that has been marketed worldwide by Disney, such that I could buy a DVD copy in Lexington's WalMart... this suggests participation in a globalization process and makes the film a remarkable artifact, in and of itself. For those who care about such things, the film took Best Animated Feature Film in the 2003 Oscars.
We can watch this film as entertainment: a story for kids, a "cartoon"... and in the English soundtrack version, there's plenty for kid audiences who know and care absolutely nothing about Japan. At that level, it's a hero tale (with a girl hero, a good thing in itself), involving conquest-of-adversity and self-realization, with animation so excellent that one can pay attention only to that, and characters so vivid that the audience laughs at the sheer fantasy or fantasticalness of them.

But at another level of involvement, deeper than the pan-cultural story/fantasy/entertainment, we can observe that a Japanese audience may appreciate many more facets, and part of my responsibility in using the film in an Anthropology course is to connect you as an audience with that level.

My process of building that connection is interesting to retell, as much to attempt to inspire emulation as to exemplify yet again my "method", which includes books as well as google searches, each informing/directing the other. I knew about Miyazaki from Totoro, to which I was introduced a year ago, LONG after I should have known about the phenomenon. I saw Spirited Away last spring, when the DVD appeared at Crossroads. I knew that the characters in the ryokan/bathhouse were more than just fantasy beings, creations of Miyazaki the imaginative genius. I knew they were representations of kami... but I didn't know a lot about kami myself, beyond the factoid that they were the local 'gods' of rural Japan. And it wasn't until I happened to read, in one of the "reviews" I uncovered via a google search, the comment that

A Japanese colleague of mine made an interesting comment on "Sen to Chihiro." He said that he felt it was the first truly Shinto movie he had ever seen -- and that it reflected a kind of domestic Shinto, not the codified state-sponsored Shinto of the Meiji Restoration and since: the domestic world of old Japan, populated with spirits and ghosts.
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Now, note that I found Jonathon Delacour's review by sifting through a LOT of google hits, most of which added little or nothing... and that the quoted piece was **a comment to a blog posting. What's the academic standing of this? Answer: nothing at all. BUT it set me on a trail of discovery. So there's one inspiration --I recognized that I needed to explore Shinto a bit, and tie in what I found to some more general observations, either connecting up to the existing macramé of Anthropology 230, or starting a new digression.
SO I went to the library Saturday morning and grabbed several books, all from the area around BL2220. One of these (Historical Dictionary of Shinto, BL2216.1 .P53 2002) provided me with EXACTLY what I needed, by way of elaborating the subject of kami.
(and here's a pdf of some especially relevant material --read at least the entries for kami and kamikakushi)
Another thing from that Jonathon Delacour review is a very nice succinct explanation of one of the events in the film which the 'entertainment' view misses completely, but WE can fit right in: Delacour explains his own process of discovery (via nausicaa.net) about the Japanese title of the film (I'll hand out some bits in class on Tuesday, but you can see for yourself just below the Japanese poster for the film in Delacour's review).

Using the film as a springboard, we could look further into Japanese culture: take up the subject of kami, their place in Shinto, Shinto's place in Japanese cultural identity and Nihonjinron, Shinto's relationships to Confucianism and Buddhism... but at the moment and with time constraints all we can do is nod in that direction, identifying it (like so many others) as a bottomless subject of interest for some other time... and go on to some broader questions of syncretism and the spiritual dimensions of people's cultural systems... seemingly a long way from (e.g.,) Cultural Revolution or Confucian ethics or samurai pride, but not actually so very remote or disconnected... and that's part of what we'll do on Thursday.

To get up to speed before seeing the film, you might want to take a look at Arcane's review for a synopsis of Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi

30 November 2004 update:

a9 search for 'sen to chihiro'

NOT 'family values'

Though Chihiro of course never actually provides sexual services in the film, it's obvious to me from the many details I've pointed out and the director's confession that Sen to Chihiro is a film about prostitution. Oddly, no critics have pointed this out. Parents take their kids to the theater and look like they don't care. Maybe most of them just think it's a fairy tale. And maybe some people who do notice are just holding their tongues...

Just in case you don't understand what Yuna Buro means, there are two kinds of bath houses in Japan. They are totally different. The one is Sento, which means public bath. There men and women enjoy a hot-tub where male workers called Sansuke work there. They wash and scrub customers' bodies. There is no sexual element. And the other one is Yuna Buro which is only for men. In Edo era, there were so many Yuna Buro in big cities. Young female massagers worked there, but massage was just a excuse. What the customers wanted for Yuna were extra services, sex. Yuna means nothing but a sex provider. And then, Yuna Buro turned to be Soapland. So, when Miyazaki chose the word Yuna, he wanted to suggest sex.