Hayao Miyazaki is considered one of
the great science-fiction writers of the 20th and early 21st
century. Using his talent for Japanese animation and comics (anime and manga),
he has given us some beautifully rendered worlds of incredible characters,
music, art and plot lines that have become classics in the SF and fantasy community.
One of his most famous works, “Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind,”
explores a common SF trope seen in many other works, most notably Frank
Herbert’s “Dune” and “Seed Stock” and the decidedly dark worlds
of “The Road” and the recent summer blockbuster, “Elysium.” That
trope, ecological dystopia, involves a decidedly negative view of the future
where a planet’s environment has changed so much that life on the planet
becomes impossible as we know it today. In Nausicaa, Princess Nausicaa
is the leader of the Wind Tribe, a group of holdouts from an environmental
apocalypse more than 1,000 years earlier that destroyed all industrialized life
on Earth. The town that the tribe lives in is protected from the “Toxic
Jungle,” a global, toxic forest guarded by massive, highly-evolved sentient
insect monsters by a favorable wind, blowing the toxic spores away from her
town. The Wind Tribe is not the only tribal holdout, another group of humans,
led by a cyborg Countess and her army of “Torumikkians,” is fighting an endless
war with the Toxic Jungle and its insect guardians, and aims to resurrect an
ancient superweapon to destroy the Jungle and rebuild industrial society. Here,
with this basic synopsis, we see two of Miyazaki’s common literary themes, he
regularly has women in power, and he regularly has animals as smart as or
smarter than humans. Miyazaki is one of the few SF authors that regularly has
female characters on a greater power level than male characters, for cultural
and literary reasons involving women. In two of his other films, “Spirited
Away” and “Princess Mononoke,” we see that the owner of the
bathhouse in “Spirited Away” is an old witch, named Yababa, of great and
terrible power who rules over the bathhouse employees like a dictator, turning
misbehaving people into pigs and keeping other spirits on “soul contracts,”
taking their names away and giving them artificial designations, and in “Mononoke,”
we see two female characters, Lady Aboshi and Mononoke herself, with agency,
efficacy and scope, something not usually seen with female characters in SF.
Also, in “Mononoke” and “Nausicaa,” there are animals that can
speak, they can think and they can even fight wars, like the Wolves and Boars
in “Mononoke” and the Ohm in “Nausicaa.” Also, in the synopsis of
“Nausicaa,” we can see similarities to other authors who write
ecological dystopian worlds. In Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” the planet
Arrakis is dry, desolate and barren of life, save for the roaming bands of
“Fremen” nomads and the giant sandworms, which the main character, Paul Muad’Dib
Atreides, must learn to ride to fulfill his destiny of leading the Fremen to
salvation. Women also hold a position of power in “Dune,” but not to the
extent as in Miyazaki’s films. Lady Jessica is, at best, a supporting character
to Dukes Lito and Paul Atreides, but while Paul is learning to fulfill his
duties as Duke of Arrakis, Lady Jessica serves as his mentor with her Bene
Gesserit training, but is still a woman without much agency. She has only as
much power as her son allows her to. Therefore, it can be seen that Herbert
might not have been well aware of women’s rights, whereas Miyazaki was, but
there are several reasons for this distinction. “Dune” was a product of
its time, published in 1965, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing, and
feminism was still in its infancy. “Nausicaa,” however, was written in
the late 1980s, well after the feminist movement had taken hold. Also, women’s
roles in Japan were historically different than in America and Europe, given
that the Japanese family was seen as one unit, every person in the household
contributed to the well-being of the family, even the women, where in American
and other Western cultures, the woman became the man’s property upon marriage,
through the process of coverture and the resulting “cult of domesticity.” Japan
always valued “women’s work” as a vital part of the economy and not just
something that women did because their husbands told them to, women understood
that their husbands needed them just as much as they needed their husbands, so
the concept of “feminism” and “women’s rights” varies from culture to culture.
So, Lady Aboshi or Nausicaa should not be looked at as a “feminist” character,
because in medieval Japan, in reality, seeing a strong, iron-willed woman as a
regional governor of a town in the absence of a man was not uncommon, though
the national, imperial government was solely male, there were never any ruling
independent female shoguns or independent Empresses. It is only because of
Western biases that we see these characters as feminist, because Japanese
family structure was based off an entirely different concept than Western
family structure. As for male characters, Miyazaki rarely has a male
protagonist of much power, in Mononoke, the main male protagonist, Ashitaka,
is cursed by a demon that only Princess Mononoke can help him cure, putting him
firmly within Mononoke’s power. Nausicaa’s male protagonist, a man named Lord
Yupa, is her loyal guardian and protector of the town, also firmly within
Nausicaa’s power. Furthermore, most of Lady Aboshi’s male soldiers are bumbling
idiots that she regularly scolds for their incompetence. This theme of gender
reversal shows itself through various Petrarchan and Machiavellian themes
throughout each of Miyazaki’s main films, and has defined him, above all other
SF writers, as truly generating a sense of wonder and extrapolation through
colorful environments and reversal of gender roles. They are true masterpieces
of science fiction work, and can show a very unique view of the world, if one
keeps an open mind to other cultures and not let Western gender perceptions get
in the way of interpreting the story. If we choose to see, we can find an
entirely new way of looking at the world. Miyazaki is an absolute genius at
achieving this end.
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