September 1, 2001: I went to see the new film by the director of Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (literally, "Spirited Away of Sen and Chihiro") in a theater in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku, Tokyo. In the neighborhood, I had to pass by a four-story building which had caught fire the night beforeó44 people had died there. It was only ten hours after the tragedy. The fire had been already put out, and the investigation seemed to be done, but there were still a lot of people crowding in front of the burnt-out building. Some of them gave flowers. Some offered prayers and wept.

The building was a department store of seedy shops. On the ground floor, there was an information center for sex shoppers, where you could  reference photos and prices of every girl who works in town. On the second floor was a kind of "sexual-harassment club" where you could roleplay with a girl who dressed up as an office worker. On the third floor, where the fire started, was an illegal mahjong gaming casino. And on the fourth floor, there was an all-you-can-touch pub named Super Loose.

"Loose" means loose socks, which Japanese ko-gals like to wear. Loose socks have become the icon of Japanese jailbait. The girls who worked at Super Loose were fake ko-gals. They were 19 to 26 years old. Customer could come in and touch the girls wherever they wanted, but the girls didn't have to take off their clothes or touch customers' private parts. That's the lightest service in Kabuki-cho, so girls who hate to sell their body but need the money worked there. When the fire occurred, there were twelve girls who worked there. Sadly, they all died because the building had no fire escape.

In Kabuki-cho, there are hundreds of building like that. I found the theater showing Miyazaki's anime feature surrounded by neon signs advertising "soaplands" (aka "Turkish bath," aka a whorehouse), massage parlors, and strip joints. But the audience in the theater consisted mostly of kids and their parents. It looked like a sanctuary for healthy family values.

However, the movie was not.

In Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Chihiro is a ten-year-old girl whose family has moved from the city to a new house in a rural town. The family goes for a ride in their Volvo. As a shortcut, Chihiro's father takes a rough and eerie path through the dense woods, despite Chihiro's trepidations. The deeper they go into the forest, the darker it grows, and eventually they stray off the main path, get lost, and end up in a small town full of nothing but restaurants and bars. Strangely, nobody is around, but the family finds a lot of dumplings, buns, roast chicken, and barbecueóall of which looks and smells magically tempting. Chihiro grows suspicious and tries to get her mom and dad to turn away from the heavenly dishes, but, despite her efforts they can't help themselves and gorge themselves like pigs.

That is, Mom and Dad literally transform into pigs.

Chihiro runs around town, looking for help. She finds a huge spa complex at the end of the street. There she meets Haku, a handsome boy who tells her the spa is an amusement facility for nature spirits; human beings aren't allowed in. When the spa opens, a hundred of spirits come down the street, all of them ugly and funny-looking monsters.

Sen to Chihiro is Miyazaki's version of Alice in Wonderland. Miyazaki explained his motivation to make the film in an interview, "Every summer, I play with my friend's daughter, who visits my cottage every day. She's now ten years old, so I thought I'd make a movie for girls her age." Lewis Caroll said much the same thing, that he wrote his famous story for a ten-year-old girl whose name was actually Alice.

The difference is that Miyazaki's "wonderland" is not like Alice's but more like Kabuki-cho.

The spa in Sen to Chihiro is decorated by red lanterns, and the interior is color-coordinated in glittering gold and red: there's no doubt this is the super-bad-taste style of a Japanese soapland. Many female workers scrub and massage bodies of the customers (they are all monsters). In this movie, the spa workers are called "Yuna" in Japanese. If you happened to have a Japanese dictionary, please refer the word. Iwanami Dictionary of Japanese defines "Yuna" as "a female spa worker who provides massage, and sex".   And Haku tells Chihiro that the only way to survive there and get back her parents is to work there like the other girls. So the ownder, Yubaba (Spa Grandma) interviews Chihiro. The stingy old lady, whose head looks four feet in diameter, is the analogue of Alice's Queen of Hearts, but she dresses like a madam from 19th-century brothel. She hires Chihiro and gives her a fake name "Sen" like a stripper being given new name, like Amber.

A ten-year-old girl forced to work in a Turkish bath? Is that the story that Miyazaki really wants to tell ten-year-old girls?

Yes. In his interview for the Japanese edition of PREMIRE magazine, Miyazaki explained that his wonderland is not just a fantasy, but represents the real world of today's Japan. "The sex industry is everywhere now in Japan," he said. "And the number of young girls who look like whores is growing."

In this interview, Miyazaki worries about the circumstance surrounds today's Japanese girls. Girls who grow up in Japan have to live surrounded by obscenity which is spread by media, no matter how much their parents try to cover their eyes. Furthermore, with the Japanese economy having gone downhill for more than a decade now, the unemployment rate is as high as it's ever beenófor women, getting a decent job is extremely difficult, because of these reasons compounded by sex discrimination. Japanese girl have got to have the guts to do anythingóeven if it's work at a place like Super Loose. They're paying the price of the indulgences of their parents' generation: in the eighties, Chihiro's mom and dad enjoyed the bubble economy's hedonism without conscienceólike pigs.

Though Chihiro of course never actually provides sexual services in the film, it's obvious to me from the many details I've pointed out and the director's confessionóthat Sen to Chihiro is a film about prostitution. Oddly, no critics have pointed this out. Parents take their kids to the theater and look like they don't care. Maybe most of them just think it's a fairy tale. And maybe some people who do notice are just holding their tongues.

Why? I think it's because of "Kaonashi" (Faceless), the customer/monster who desires Chihiro. Though we don't know what he wants Chihiro, Kaonashi offers money to her.

 "Kaonashi is Miyazaki himself," says Toshio Suzuki, producer of Sen to Chihiro, in the PREMIRE interview but Miyazaki fervently denies his partner's interpretation.

 "No!" he says. "Kaonashi is a metaphor, the libido that everybody secretly harbors."

Kaonashi might have come from Miyazaki's subconsciousness. I can't help but associate him with two infamous pedophiles. Of course, the first one is Lewis Caroll, who collected nude photos of little girls, including Alice. Miyazaki is so fascinated by Alice that he ripped off the face of the Cheshire Cat for his famous TOTORO's face and the Cat Bus. And the another pedphile Miyazaki reminds me of is Tsutomu Miyazaki (no relation), who kidnapped three preschool girls in the 1980s and killed them. In the court, he told his dream where he played in flower garden with girls he killed. I know the association is too impolite to discuss for a respectable children's film director like Hayao Miyazaki. That might be why no one wants to discuss the sexual elements in Sen to Chihiro.

If you don't care about Kaonashi, Sen to Chihiro is a masterpiece. I was mesmerized by the tones of crazy creatures and the nightmarish images. And I was also relieved to see that the spa had a fire escape. 

Just in case you don't understand what Yuna Buro means, there are two kinds of bath houses in Japan. They are totally different. The one is Sento, which means public bath. There men and women enjoy a hot?tub where male workers called Sansuke work there. They wash and scrub customers' bodies. There is no sexual element. And the other one is Yuna Buro which is only for men. In Edo era, there were so many Yuna Buro in big cities. Young female massagers worked there, but massage was just a excuse. What the customers wanted for Yuna were extra services, sex. Yuna means nothing but a sex provider. And then, Yuna Buro turned to be Soapland. So, when Miyazaki chose the word Yuna, he wanted to suggest sex.

-Tomohiro Machiyama