From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

3. The Saintly Politics of Catastrophe: Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind

Indeed, if anyone can show that what we’ve said is false and has adequate knowledge that justice is best, he’ll surely be full not of anger but of forgiveness for the unjust. He knows that, apart from someone of godlike character who is disgusted by injustice or one who has gained knowledge and avoids injustice for that reason, no one is just willingly. —PLATO, THE REPUBLIC SAINTS AND REVOLUTION The narratives of Hayao Miyazaki are distinguished by their sense of moral nuance and by their fair-minded treatment of dramatic conflict. In the film that has been celebrated as his masterpiece, Princess Mononoke, he treats the problem of environmental destruction with compelling equanimity . The human beings who despoil the natural world are not motivated by greed, nor are they mindless consumers of material possessions. Rather, Miyazaki chooses to portray the destroyers of nature in the most sympathetic light possible—they are the members of a community drawn from the lowliest denizens of feudal Japan: subsistence farmers, destitute laborers, lepers, and prostitutes whose freedom has been purchased by the town’s ruler, the ruthless and compassionate Lady Eboshi. This utopian community of the oppressed and outcast prospers and grows powerful by mining iron ore, which leads them to cut down the trees and pollute the river. Their nascent industry brings them into conflict not only with the samurai landholders living downstream but also with the animal gods that 93 3 THE SAINTLY POLITICS OF CATASTROPHE Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind protect the forest. The defenders of the forest are animals that are intelligent and possess the power of speech. The wolves and boars fighting the humans are shown to be as noble as they are deadly. The central conflict of Mononoke accordingly develops not as a morality play that straightforwardly divides its characters between good and evil, but rather as a clash between two rights, pitting the defenders of the forest against a community of the oppressed and outcast that is intent on exploiting its resources in order to safeguard its destiny. The rights of Nature cannot be defended without cruelty, while the human community that destroys it exhibits an undeniably revolutionary dimension. Into the fray steps the protagonist, the banished Prince Ashitaka, who seeks not to secure the triumph of one side over the other but rather to bring about their reconciliation. Ashitaka, who, significantly, is a member of the indigenous Ainu people driven from their homelands by the ethnic Japanese,1 is distinguished by a sense of impartiality, his steadfast desire to understand the perspectives and motives of others, especially those of his enemies, without succumbing to the impulse to condemn them. Such a disinterested standpoint, far from resulting in cold detachment, is accompanied by a readiness to take action and risk his life in the aid of others. It could thus be said that Miyazaki’s protagonists demonstrate saintly qualities, as their moral resolve—and initiative to act—is often heightened rather than diminished by their awareness of the irreducible ambiguities inherent to the conflicts and struggles they confront. Ashitaka reproaches himself for injuring and taking the lives of fellow human beings even when his acts have the unquestionably heroic consequence of saving the lives of others. On the other hand, he does not waver in his efforts to bring an end to the war between Iron Town, or Tatara, and the forest. The prince, who is exiled from his people after suffering a demonic curse, recognizes the catastrophic dangers certain to be unleashed as the conflict intensifies. At the end of the film, he and San, a human girl raised by the wolf goddess as her own daughter, are able to avert the apocalyptic destruction of both the forest and the human community. Eboshi, who seeks to defeat once and for all the gods of the forest, shoots and decapitates its highest guardian, the forest spirit or shishigami, which in daytime takes the form of a stag with a human-like face. But the deer god, an utterly enigmatic 94 THE SAINTLY POLITICS OF CATASTROPHE figure of nonhuman otherness, fails to die, taking on instead a ghostly form to search for his head. A toxic substance flows from his body, destroying everything in its wake and making barren the earth. Ashitaka and San succeed in restoring to the deer god his head...