I had been thinking for some time about writing an essay on Princess Mononoke, but what finally prompted this one was a themed call for submissions. So let me first unpack the theme: “Villains we only understood after growing up.”
What do we mean by a villain? Is there a completely neutral, objective order of good and evil, detached from any particular history, by which we can identify someone as wholly evil—a villain? My answer is no. Nor need “growing up” mean the biological transition from 17.9 to 18 years old. Taken together, then, I understand the theme as follows: characters whom some characters in the story and some readers see as having an evil side, and whom I have come to see very differently since my first encounter with them—or about whom I have gained some new insight.
With the theme sorted out, I can stop worrying about straying off-topic and turn to the central figure of this essay:
I imagine you have at least some idea of the plot of Princess Mononoke, so I will not go over it here. Instead, let me briefly describe my first impression of Lady Eboshi: the embodiment of a leader who destroys nature to improve human life. Well, yes, it was that simple. This was an immediate impression, received through the senses rather than worked out through reflection; there was nothing here that required viewers to unearth hidden details before they could grasp it. Princess Mononoke is not a work that keeps things under wraps. My first impression was therefore simple and direct, and even now that judgment needs no revision in its broad outline. In terms of the “environmental protection” theme that viewers widely agree the old master Miyazaki wanted to convey, Lady Eboshi certainly qualifies as a kind of “villain.”
So all I can offer next are interpretations and conjectures—perhaps with some basis—to bring out more of her complexity.
1. Care for Women and Disadvantaged People
“Improving life for humanity” is a grand label to pin on her; look more closely, and even Lady Eboshi herself would not want it. Her concern is more specifically for society’s disadvantaged groups:
We should notice that she is not simply dispensing charity. She gives women who have been sold and people with leprosy—marginalized people excluded by the old symbolic order of society—new places in which they can build a life, finding them a purpose and a way to go on living. We see women become the main workforce operating the ironworks’ bellows. Within the film’s world, this seems comparable to the textile industry, with women controlling an advanced productive force. People with leprosy, too, find a place in the ironworks community by developing and making firearms.
There has already been plenty of discussion of Lady Eboshi’s role in advancing women’s rights. Through the ironworks, an emerging field of social relations, women enter the public sphere: they participate in ironmaking and take up blades and guns to defend the stronghold. The film does not directly show women’s circumstances elsewhere for comparison, but it is not hard to imagine that progress of this kind could happen only here, in the place Lady Eboshi controls. Iron Town has become a little world of its own. Women who have lived there for years do not even know that the old world outside has someone called “His Majesty the Emperor.”
Lady Eboshi does not stand for “humanity” as a whole, whether the humanity of her time or a humanity abstracted from history. Rather, she embodies a humanist current in human historical development that emphasizes “equality between women and men” and “the standing of human beings as subjects.” She firmly resists the high-ranking Lord Asano, who covets her territory and represents the old order—and she has the upper hand. As for the monk who serves as the emperor’s lackey, she uses him (and is used by him). The supplementary backstory for Lady Eboshi helps us understand this more clearly: “She was the daughter of a poor family and married a foreign bandit. Because of his brutality, she eventually killed her husband and returned to Japan with treasure.”
When discussing Princess Mononoke, we often fall too quickly into the binary opposition of “humanity versus nature,” forgetting that humanity is not a monolith. Human beings are diverse, and their understanding and ways of life develop historically.
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2. Not the Destruction of Nature, but Anthropocentrism
Having discussed how Lady Eboshi does not embody humanity as a whole, let us consider another question. Does Eboshi, with her humanist outlook, regard nature with total hostility, as people commonly imagine? No.
What do we see here, and in the first image of this essay? An orderly garden, with trees, grass, and vegetables. Human beings do not live in the universe on air alone. And if we think about it, aren’t iron sand and iron ore parts of nature too? Lady Eboshi is certainly not trying to destroy nature as such. To bring about her idea of an improvement in human life, she selectively destroys some parts of nature, uses others, and remakes nature (to suit her own wishes): cutting down trees, extracting iron ore, and planting her garden, respectively. To my mind, this is a fairly typical form of anthropocentrism from the era of humanism and the Enlightenment.
Whether for survival or for beauty, human beings need nature. But the nature Lady Eboshi demands is nature she has conquered and trampled underfoot; she treats nature as an enemy she must fight. This is a more detailed account of her view of nature. Let me slip in a little bonus here: Rewrite, whose main storyline was written by Romeo Tanaka, also explores this issue. Its text occasionally expresses disgust at the “greenery” deliberately manufactured under human domination. But what Rewrite1 explores is how to deepen our thinking about what environmental protection means for humanity in a modern society where environmental protection is already a matter of consensus. Its historical setting differs from that of Princess Mononoke, and so do the questions informing it.
3. An Androgynous Personality?
One strand of feminist thought holds that we should shape a new kind of human being, combining women’s care and tenderness with men’s courage while discarding undesirable traits such as belligerence and vanity. Such a person would embody what we might call the ideal of an “androgynous” personality. (Of course, these traits rest on a particular mainstream culture’s pre-existing assumptions about gender and personality; what these thinkers seek is to use public reasoning to select the good and discard the bad.)
I think Lady Eboshi does embody this ideal of an “androgynous” personality in one respect. She cares for the weak and does not fear the strong; she is brave, resourceful, and calm. If we consider only her dealings with people, the description seems apt. Yet I also think her role in the film puts her on the belligerent side, and she embodies the conquest of nature associated with masculine culture.
It is fairly easy to see how the attitudes and words of the male protagonist, Ashitaka, represent the creator’s own attitudes and hopes. Ashitaka repeatedly speaks out to stop Lady Eboshi’s trampling of nature and her efforts to hunt down and kill the Forest Spirit, but she pays almost no heed to his views and persists on her own path. Clearly, to return to our first impression, we can say that the old master does not endorse Lady Eboshi’s simple approach when it proceeds without Ashitaka’s intervention. Her character becomes harder to pin down again: she falls short of this ideal of “androgyny” (especially if we consider those feminist thinkers who link women with nature and its protection).
Instead, it is Ashitaka, the clear-eyed young man from an eastern tribe, who is brave and skilled in battle yet shows care for nature and humanity at every turn, valuing feeling rather than advantage. I find many feminine traits in him, and see him, too, as an embodiment of “androgyny.” Still, I fear such an ideal personality may remain just that—an ideal to discuss.
4. A Way Forward?
In sections 1, 2, and 3, I have set out some of my thoughts on Lady Eboshi. Building on those, let me turn to the work as a whole. San, Princess Mononoke, embodies nature’s resistance to and punishment of humanity. Of course, we can also read her as embodying a more radical demand for nature’s protection from within humanity itself. Lady Eboshi, meanwhile, is a leader who calls for simply conquering nature in the name of human progress—though, again, not the progress of humanity as a whole abstracted from its historical context. Ashitaka represents those among humanity who seek coexistence with nature and oppose simply conquering it (consider the Emishi tribe he comes from, far from civilization). He speaks in the creator’s voice, hoping the two sides can “talk” and go on living together.
Throughout the film, Ashitaka repeatedly insists that they must find a way for humanity and nature, the ironworks and the forest, to coexist, and that they must go on living together. In concrete terms, the film locates this path in his efforts to bring about some reform of the ironworks community, and to persuade Lady Eboshi and correct her course:
Let us take another look at the being that is the Forest Spirit:
The Forest Spirit is the ecological environment itself; humans and the forest’s plants and animals all live within it. As another essay of ours puts it:
Ultraman Gaia introduces an ecocentric dimension through Hiroya Fujimiya: monsters are part of the Earth, and human activity is the real source of catastrophe. Although Fujimiya’s thinking rests on information tampered with by the Radical Destruction Bringer—which foreshadows his biased, anti-human outlook—ecocentrism undoubtedly offers a critical reconsideration of the image of monsters in earlier Ultraman works as irrational destroyers. More importantly, it paves the way for the series’ eventual unification of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. At the final moment, Earth’s monsters join humanity in resisting the Radical Destruction Bringer’s invasion. This image not only suggests that nonhuman beings, too, may possess moral agency—the capacity to make moral judgments—but also expresses the ultimate, sweeping reconciliation of humanity and nature.
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Finally, in Lady Eboshi’s words, I also see hope that human understanding can progress from simply conquering nature toward reconciliation and coexistence:
Besides a new relationship with nature, there are also hints of how the new village will coexist with outside human powers. Once again, we come to understand that humanity does not stand opposed to nature as a single, almost mythical whole. People have their own positions and interests within it. To defend the ironworks, Lady Eboshi really does have to pay closer attention to the sinister forces within humanity than to silent nature.
I will put down my pen here. This is a modest, hurried essay; I leave further reflection to you, my fellow readers. The film screenshots come from the Chinese–Japanese bilingual edition by the Kamigami fansub group. My thanks to them.