Ruthless Compassion: Lady Eboshi in 'Princess Mononoke'

Ms Formerly Aldgate has introduced me over the last two years to the work of the Japanese animated production house Studio Ghibli and its acclaimed output of quirky (Kiki’s Delivery Service), wacky (The Castle of Laputa), moving (The Wind Rises), achingly sad (Grave of the Fireflies) or plain weird films (Ponyo). I had half a mind, having watched Princess Mononoke (1997) some time ago, to post about the most striking character in that movie (and arguably any of the others), and having just completed Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (1984) that half-a-mind has grown to a whole one. This is because of a clear resemblance between Lady Eboshi of the first film, whose characterisation first caught my attention, and Lady Kushana of the second, earlier animation.

Both movies dramatise the conflict between humanity and nature, although Mononoke is set in medieval Japan and Nausicaa in an imaginary future a millennium after the collapse of industrial society, and in many ways the earlier film seems a dry run for the subtler, later one. Both Kushana and Eboshi are strong women, military leaders of their respective social groups; both stand on the side of human conquest of the natural world; both act as antagonists to a pair of younger male and female heroes; both are extremely beautiful where their female opponents are merely girlishly pretty. Both, strangely, are mutilated; we discover that Kushana's left arm, clad in gold armour, is prosthetic, and it’s strongly implied that her similarly armoured legs are too; while Eboshi loses her right forearm towards the end of Princess Mononoke.

In Nausicaa, Kushana acts on behalf of Tolmekia, a warlike kingdom which finds itself accidentally in conflict with the peaceable Valley of the Winds, of which Nausicaa is Princess. Her mission is to prepare and employ a Giant Fire Warrior, a living weapon whose use in the distant past proved catastrophic to human society, to burn and cleanse the Sea of Decay, a toxic jungle haunted by gigantic mutant insects whose gradual encroachment threatens the remnants of humanity. In the later narrative, Lady Eboshi leads a proto-industrial settlement called Irontown, whose citizens face destitution unless they can exploit the iron reserves hidden beneath an adjoining forest; this brings her into conflict with the creatures, both natural and magical, for whom the ancient woods are home. The women are, therefore, on parallel missions. Both are courageous and extremely brave; both show flashes of sardonic humour.

This makes the divergence all the more striking. Kushana is never more than a sketch for Eboshi just as Nausicaa is a rough outline for Mononoke. Eboshi never exhibits Kushana's capacity for treachery or unnecessary cruelty. Kushana is also simply incorrect; she remains unaware of the crucial fact the film’s heroes, Nausicaa and Asbel, discover – that the Sea of Decay rests on a petrified forest where the air and water are clean, and is thus purifying the poisoned earth. Eboshi’s mission is more morally ambiguous, and is, very interestingly, presented with such a variety of positive aspects that it becomes very hard indeed to dislike her. Irontown is not merely an embryonic techno-capitalist society juxtaposed with an older, natural way of living: it’s a sanctuary for the damaged and marginalised and a place of social progress. Eboshi has personally rescued considerable numbers of prostitutes, buying them out of their contracts and taking them to Irontown to work in her factory. Another group of workers are lepers who are not only employed but cared for: no wonder they speak about her in glowing terms. In Irontown, men and women have different work but equal status: they both defend the town side-by-side when defence is required. Some reviewers characterise Eboshi as motivated by ‘greed’, but this is reading her domain wrong. The town is nothing less than an alternative society, a vision of something better than 16^th-century Japan offered, unhampered by status and tradition. There is no doubt that Eboshi would export her revolution if she got the chance, and the world might not be a worse place for it. It’s not as though this is the last forest in existence, or that the natural world cares anything for the welfare of the humans who move across it: this is an era when people all too often have to grub a living from an unyielding earth, facing starvation the next time a harvest fails, and Eboshi’s vision, of human beings liberated and given their true worth by work and progress, is, surely, worth a few trees.

The only characters without a good word to say for the dictator of Irontown are the heroes, the noble Ashitaka and the feral San. San stands alongside the creatures of the forest, and no longer even thinks of herself as human; Ashitaka is being slowly poisoned from a wound inflicted by a boar-god driven mad by an iron bullet forged, as it turns out, in Eboshi’s own factory. Her people, on the other hand, not only respect her – they love her. They adore her. She, for her part, is far from starry-eyed about them; she is nevertheless utterly clear and focused about how they can be helped, and about clearing whatever stands in the way, from trees to neighbouring lords to gods. Hers is a ruthless compassion. She is the embodiment of Enlightenment rationalism, as dismissive of the Emperor as she is of the forest spirits. The fact that Studio Ghibli’s auteur Hayao Miyazaki, with his environmentalist concerns, chooses to represent this ideology so positively is remarkable.

Lady Eboshi finishes the movie humbled, recognising the devastation unleashed by her foolhardy assault on the Forest Spirit, and promising Ashitaka ‘we’ll build a better village’. She realises that the earth cannot simply be conquered, and that ultimately human welfare relies on it. But her vision remains intact: the devotion of her people is undimmed, her revolution unabandoned. She remains a compelling image of an almost ideal leadership.

I am not the first person to have written in praise of Lady Eboshi. Not at all. Certainly not. Far from it.