War, Peace and Coexistence
Princess Mononoke is a film that plays heavily with the themes of war, peace and coexistence. The best way to view these themes are in terms of black white and grey. This might not make the movie the most enjoyable, it makes it the most open to apply to the real world. The Director, Hayao Miyazaki, has been a favorite of mine for dabbling with presenting good and evil in muddier terms than most western media. In other words sometimes war is something thought to be needed for peace as seen in the attack by the infected Boar god Nago on Emishi village, home of one of the protagonists Prince Ashitaka. This encounter can be seen as an allegory to the story itself as a whole. One group fights nature and in doing so learns they must decide to fight nature in war, give in to it through peace, or live on knowing that nature will walk beside them and coexist. For Emishi village coexistence is the path chosen as killing the boar curses Ashitaka causing him to gain unworldly strength linked with pain and to live in exile from his home so that the rest of the village wouldn’t perish. This beginning puts Ashitaka at a position similar to Uncle Iroh from Avatar the Last Airbender where the character experiences the full arc at the beginning or before the story is told. Ashitaka’s experiences give him the insight of how to coexist with nature and the ability “To see with eyes unclouded by hate.”
Ashitaka is the grey that sits besides the two others fighting over Iron Town and the surrounding land. Both San and Lady Eboshi want the land for opposing reasons being that of letting nature run its course or harvest something from it. These differences lead to war and it’s understandable why. For Lady Eboshi to build Iron Town she needed to clear cut the forest that was there to get access to the iron. This is a war in itself where most of the nature that stood there before Lady Eboshi arrived was destroyed. A peaceful option would be to find the iron on the surface of the forest floor and move it to another iron smith or not mine it at all. The path of coexistence would be that of making a mine and still establishing an iron smith on a smaller scale that does not displace as much of the forest inhabitants. San on the other hand is trying to defend her home so she has more of the moral high ground but still most of her attempts to discourage expansionism have been violent and warlike. Granted it’s unsure that San could try a peaceful route when her opposition has a new technology in the form of guns but maybe try and stage a protest?
Miyazaki paints this conflict as a moral dilemma where both sides have valid points to keep their ways of life intact. For San this is the only life she has ever known and it’s also the home to a plethora of nature gods. This has been their homeland for countless generations, similar to Ashitaka’s people back in Emishi village. Lady Eboshi on the other hand has used Iron Town to take in lepers who would likely die as outcasts if not for her help. Both sides are warring over their own ideal of peace. The pursuit of each of these ideals leads to the decapitation and then later death of the forest spirit while Iron Town itself is destroyed. The film ends with the sides learning what Ashitaka did in the beginning to coexist while he stays to mediate between the two even though his curse is lifted.
As a Nation we’re kinda in a similar situation. One group sees things should stay the same as another sees that we should advance onwards. For like in the Film these principles are inherently conflicting in more complex ways. We are not fighting over the homeland of gods or the iron under the ground and advancing technology, our issues are much more grey. We as a nation are in the midst of the Forest and Iron Town standoff. Both sides do have evil lurking beneath but between the two of them there’s still good people, granted some need to learn “To see with eyes unclouded by hate.” I don’t think some massive forest spirit will come and make us realize how trivial and nonsensical some of these issues are. We are currently in the biggest surge of Covid-19 in the state of Maine due to the Delta variant. This will probably be the closest we would get to the forest spirit’s vengeance and still it’s being used as a tool to disjoin and partition people to dig deeper into the ground in which one stands. I don’t have a solution, I wish I could find a way to make everyone happy and keep the boat floating, but what helps is that Miyazaki doesn’t really either. He proposes coexistence with the mediation of outsiders but I’m truly unsure if that’s all we need but it might be worth a shot.
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