Politics

Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki Hayao, and Japan in the Nineties

Jonathan Gorga
Thursday, May 27, 2010

In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Edo bay aboard his famous ‘black ships’ and after two years of awkward negotiation, forced the ports of Japan open to American trade. The frenzy of westernization, reform, and nation-building that followed through the next forty or so years was turbulent and unpredictable. But it was nothing compared to the chaos that characterized Japan in the middle of the last decade of the Twentieth Century. Corruption had been a stalwart part of Japanese business since before World War II, but a half-century of graft and kick-back-fueled construction projects between politicians had finally come to a head, and as American author Ian Buruma put it, “there was a sense among many Japanese of something missing in their rich and increasingly ugly country.” The people wanted change, and in unexpected ways, they got it. The 1990s were an absolute wreck for the Japanese. The new prime minister in 2000, Mori Yoshiro, was the ninth elected since 1989. But there was one man who took all these catastrophes and turned them into artistic gold: world-famous anime director Miyazaki Hayao. In the middle of this decade, Miyazaki realized his animated feature film masterpiece Mononoke-Hime, which became the highest grossing film of all time in Japan. This ground-breaking movie was released in 1997, but production began in 1994 amidst political, economic, and social insanity.

The disruption of Japanese culture began with the burst of the Economic Bubble in 1991, which fueled the breaking of the Liberal Democratic Party’s consistent rule in 1993-1996, which was concurrent with the dual natural and terrorist disasters of 1995. Miyazaki Hayao considered this chaos a spiritual abyss and saw a return to the sensibilities of the forest as a salve. That is specifically why Miyazaki’s Mononoke-Hime (or Princess Mononoke; Hime is the honorary equivalent of “Princess” in English) was made.  In just the two short years from 1990 to 1991 the Japanese ‘miracle’ economy that had been building since the 1950s was absolutely laid to waste. After the intense and continuous growth of the 80s, during which the area around the Imperial Palace had the same worth as the totality of the state of California, the plummet was all the more painful and it didn’t abate for almost ten years. This lead to a complete change in the mindset of the Japanese people. Quite suddenly, all the work they had done for their country’s economy was dashed away due to inflated loans and rampant speculative investment. In 1993, this discontent coupled with the long-standing desire for a leader to root out corruption resulted in a vote of no confidence against the standing prime minister, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, the party that led Japanese politics since 1955. So Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi was kicked out, a coalition of new parties won the subsequent election and 30 years of single party reign ended.

For a moment, optimism reigned and these new leaders set about attempting to permanently pry the government out of the LDP’s hands by reforming the electoral system because it had long since become a revolving door. This began an equally depressing political tug of war that elected three different prime ministers from three different parties over three years. The Japanese were experiencing a society-wide anxiety that was also due in large part to the two monumental disasters of 1995: the massive Kobe earthquake followed just a few months later by the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the AUM Shinrikyo terrorist group. Their political system in chaos, their sense of security shattered, and their economic ‘Bubble’ turned around, the 1990s were a time of pain and re-adjustment for the Japanese. This was the fertile social ground that gave birth to possibly the greatest achievement of Japanese animation in its 60-year history.

Miyazaki Hayao had worked for almost a decade before the explosive occurrences of the early 90s threw the careful balance of Japan’s world off kilter. The first film that Miyazaki helmed as writer and director was 1984’s Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa, translated into English as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a highly intelligent work exploring themes of war amid a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by environmental devastation on a huge scale. Miyazaki has come over the thirty years since to be one of the select few celebrities of animation, known to movie-goers the world over. The themes of Nausicaa were to become the perpetual concentration of Miyazaki’s oeuvre, but it was his environmental concerns that came to the forefront when making Mononoke-Hime. Miyazaki’s style of filmmaking centers around childhood yet his storytelling is sophisticated enough to appeal to adults. He is a director devoted to the betterment of his viewers. According to the expansive fan-site GhibliWiki, the time during which the LDP were ousted from the government is almost exactly the time-frame during which Mononoke was produced. The LDP lost control of the country in the snap-election that was held in July 1993. Mononoke-Hime began production almost exactly a year later in August 1994. The LDP regained complete control of the political system in 1997, the same year of Mononoke’s completion (June 16^th) and release (July 12^th). The devastating Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway attacks occurred in the middle of the production of Mononoke, during 1995. Whether or not they had any effect on Miyazaki’s development of Mononoke’s story is a question with an obvious answer. Environmentalism was an issue of great concern for Miyazaki as far back as Nausicaa. And it is notable that in Mononoke, war takes a secondary position.

Few anime aren’t overshadowed by the memory-image of the atomic mushroom-cloud. Miyazaki completely removed this element by placing the story in Muromachi era Japan and depicting very, very few explosions or battles. Especially in comparison with something like Otomo Katsuhiro’s ultra-violent Akira from 1988, made before the Bubble ‘burst.’ In absolute antithesis, Mononoke centers more on the quiet power of the shishigami, the spirit of the forest. Through this figure, as well as others, the film engenders a kind of chaotic peace that grows as the story builds. This serves to further emphasize Miyazaki’s environmental/spiritual call to action. “Japanese... have alienated themselves from their own natural and spiritual environment,” said in an interview during production. According to Miyazaki, the Muromachi era was when “people changed their value system from gods to money.” Miyazaki chose this relatively obscure period of transition for the setting of his ‘historical fantasy’ because he desired a lesser-understood canvas on which he could paint his story about the dangers manufacturing poses to the environment as well as the dangers pride and greed pose to the psyche. Author Susan Napier describes the film in her book Anime: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation as “a wake-up call... that attempts to provoke its audience into realizing how much they have already lost and how much more they stand to lose.” That this warning comes in the mid-90s amid debilitating economic, political, and ecological crises is no coincidence.

When Mononoke-Hime was released it was a sensation. Of course, as Buddhism holds, all things are transitive. It is the unequivocal truth of the world that whether something is good or bad it will end even, they realize, Buddhism itself. It was probably no great surprise that the attempt at a reformed electoral system was a passing movement. By 1996, the LDP was back and by 1997 the reformers were ousted. The new prime minister was LDP. The AUM Shinrikyo terrorist group’s headquarters were raided after the attack, the leader was apprehended, and the group has since been effectively dismantled. Miyazaki Hayao is a part of the history of the art of animation, the cultural tapestry of his country, and of world culture. He tried to quit the grueling work of the animation business after completing Mononoke-Hime. His intention was to retire peacefully and only create short films for display in his grand Ghibli Studios museum located in a small suburb of Osaka. He has returned however and created three feature length films since: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) in 2001, Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle) in 2004, and Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo) in 2008. It seems that Miyazaki, like Japan, has no choice but to continue struggling on as long as necessary.

“Japanese today have nothing to rely on in their minds. They have alienated themselves from their own natural and spiritual environment.”

~ Miyazaki Hayao in an interview, months before the release of Princess Mononoke

“In local elections in 1995 [the Japanese] had also chosen two former comedians to be governors of Tokyo and Osaka, which seemed to be some sort of political statement.”

~ Kenneth G. Henshall’s A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower