Special: Spirited Away — Part 1: The Bathhouse as a Labor Contract

What happens when you are forced to leave everything familiar behind, thrust into a world that demands you shed your very identity? This is the central question Spirited Away asks, not just of its young protagonist Chihiro, but of an entire generation navigating the complexities of modern life. Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, which premiered in Japan on July 20, 2001, and earned an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 (the first Japanese film to do so)has captivated audiences across three decades. Its longevity and widespread appeal are clear, but mere numbers cannot explain the film’s enduring power. The true heart of its message resides in a scene lasting almost five minutes, often overlooked yet utterly pivotal.

Late in Spirited Away, Chihiro boards a train gliding across a shallow sea beneath a twilight sky. Beside her sits Kaonashi (顔無し, “No-Face”), silent. Boh, transformed into a mouse, rests in her lap. The train pauses at stations, passengers disembarking in quiet unison. These passengers visually resemble Kaonashi: translucent human shadows, featureless. This imagery is no accident. The scene’s deliberate pacing speaks directly to ma (間), a fundamental Japanese aesthetic concept signifying the silent space between things: a pause that structures everything from classical music to architecture. Rather than offering explanations, Miyazaki invites the viewer to reflect. This extended silence is the film’s longest, and far from decorative, it serves as its crucial thematic key.

Who are these faceless people? And why does Chihiro, with her hair tied back and a resolute gaze fixed on the window, still retain her face? The entire film, in a single image, provides the answer. These passengers can be understood as adults who have already crossed the threshold Chihiro now approaches. They represent the journey from rural innocence to the bustling city, from childhood freedom to the demands of labor, from a personal name to an impersonal identification number. Yet Miyazaki never paints anyone as evil. He simply presents two sides of every choice, leaving viewers to decide which path they will carry.

Before the Tunnel: A Family Already Without Anchors

To truly grasp this profound scene, we must return to the film’s beginning.

Before the tunnel, before the bathhouse, before the spirits known as kami appear, a family moves. This is where Spirited Away truly starts.

The opening scene holds more weight than it appears. Chihiro lies in the back seat of her parents’ car, clutching a wilting bouquet: a farewell gift from her school friends. They are moving to a new city, a new neighborhood, a new house, a new school. She makes the pout every child makes when parents make decisions for them. This serves as the catalyst. Spirited Away tells the story of a girl torn from her familiar world and cast into a place where nobody knows her. The real Japan of the 1990s and 2000s saw many such transitions. Families from the countryside relocated to newly developed suburbs.

As her father misjudges the road and veers onto a dirt path, what appears outside the window is Japan disappearing in real time. Small stone statues lining the path, hokora (祠): tiny rural shrines signaling the presence of kami in every valley, emerge overgrown, abandoned. No one maintains them anymore. No one recognizes their meaning. The deserted theme park where the parents stop perfectly symbolizes 1990s Japan. During the economic boom of the 1980s, the country built hundreds of theme parks across its rural landscape. When the bubble burst in 1991, most of these attractions closed, left to decay, empty. Miyazaki stated in interviews that these places directly inspired him. They felt, he remarked, haunted.

Photo: Double torii gate path at Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine, Kyoto. These thousands of gates, donated by businesses in exchange for good fortune, mirror the bathhouse’s transactional logic: enter, pay, belong. Photo by Basile Morin / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons

The parents smell food and venture in. They eat without asking whose it is, without paying, without ceremony. “We’ll pay with the credit card later,” the father says, chewing. Within minutes, they transform into pigs. The punishment appears direct, but the film accomplishes something more subtle than merely chastising consumerism. Chihiro’s parents are not inherently bad people or gluttons. They are ordinary adults who entered a place where something was offered without ceremony and immediately succumbed because they possessed no strong moral anchor to restrain them. The place demanded gluttony, and they complied. Every character from that moment onward faces some version of the same trial.

Chihiro does not eat. She tries to warn them but they ignore her. She feels afraid, but she abstains from the food. She still carries values. Not consciously articulated yet, but present. The farewell bouquet from her school friends remains on the car seat. Her life still holds anchors. Her parents’ lives no longer do. This is why she passes through, and they fall.

Miyazaki avoids dividing the film into clear-cut good and evil. Instead, he reveals an entire spectrum, from the extremes of vice to moderate indulgence, from untouched purity to those excluded by the system itself. Each character occupies a specific point on this moral scale.

When Chihiro arrives at Yubaba’s (湯婆婆) bathhouse, the old woman does not welcome her as a guest. She greets her as an employment candidate. She demands a contract signature. She dictates the terms, ensuring that if Chihiro fails to comply, she will turn into a pig, just like her parents. This marks Chihiro’s entry into the adult world. Yubaba is her first boss. The bathhouse, her first company.

To the unaware viewer, this might seem like the beginning of a story about labor exploitation. It is more than that. The bathhouse truly functions as a mirror. Every character who enters finds reflected the vice that most closely matches the weakness they brought from the outside. The allegory is not about work. It is about values.

Chihiro’s parents found gluttony at the abandoned park, even before reaching the bathhouse. They ate without ceremony, without asking, without offering anything in return. They became pigs in minutes. The film opens with this image because it represents the most didactic version of the process. Miyazaki silently conveys: observe how quickly it happens. See how anyone can fall.

Inside the bathhouse, the menu of vices becomes more varied. Yubaba embodies avarice. She counts gold, counts contracts, counts employees as if they were coins. Bo, her gigantic baby, symbolizes an infancy imprisoned in comfort: fear of the world, dependence, laziness, immaturity. The frog employees embody noisy envy. The servile slugs follow orders without question. This moral map emerged from an academic analysis by Tatsuya Sakata of Doshisha University, drawing upon “Orikaeshiten” on pages 252 and 263, which categorized characters as gluttonous (parents), solitary (Kaonashi), egocentric (frogs), servile (slugs), hegemonic (Yubaba), self-indulgent (Bo), and kind-but-foolish (Haku).

Miyazaki uses the bathhouse as a moral map, embedding each vice with its own inherent punishment. No one there receives punishment from a deity. Each character entrapped themselves, without realizing it, in the vice that offered the easiest comfort when emptiness appeared. And here lies the detail many Western analyses simplify: the film does not divide the world into pure and corrupted. There are degrees.

The extremes are easily identified. The parents exhibit gluttony in its purest state. Yubaba demonstrates avarice in its purest form. Bo displays fear, dependence, and laziness in an infantilized state. The frogs embody noisy envy, the slugs total servility. These are the characters who surrendered entirely, without moderation, without brakes, without awareness.

In the middle of the spectrum reside characters many analyses mistakenly label as pure. Rin is not. She enjoys good food, becomes excited when Kaonashi begins distributing gold, complains about her work, and dreams of leaving the bathhouse for the big city. She experiences gluttony, avarice, and envy, but in small doses, never allowing any of them to take complete control. Kamaji resembles her. He commands the susuwatari (soot sprites) with kindness but also uses them as labor. Grumpy and a bargainer, he has his own petty concerns. He is no monk.

This constitutes the most important point for viewers contemplating the film in relation to their own lives. Miyazaki does not demand sainthood. He does not ask anyone to reject the system, escape work, or become Zeniba and move to an isolated field. He shows, through Rin and Kamaji, that one can live within the system without becoming a pig, without becoming a giant Kaonashi, without becoming Yubaba. It is a matter of moderation. It means not allowing any single vice to fully capture you.

On the other side of the spectrum are Chihiro and Zeniba, but for different reasons. Chihiro represents the child not yet captured, an original purity before the adult crossing. Zeniba exemplifies the rare adult who recognized what the system offered and chose to leave. She is not pure in a naive sense. She is also a witch; she threatens, and she tests. But she lives in a field, knits, and welcomes arrivals without demanding payment. She represents the possibility of an “outside,” at the cost of isolation.

Haku and the River That No Longer Exists

And then there is a fourth type, which the film treats with the most careful attention of all: those excluded by the system. Haku stands as the central example. He did not enter the bathhouse due to vice or conscious choice. He was the kami of the Kohaku River, and the river was filled in during urbanization, buried by construction and streets. This is not mere symbolism. Modern Japan filled in many rivers and streams after World War II, between the 1960s and 1970s, during its developmental rush. Each erased river carried away entire communities, landscapes, local kami, and ways of life. Miyazaki transforms this disappearance into a spiritual wound.

Without his river, without identity, without function, Haku accepted the contract with Yubaba because it was the only option left. He was not captured by gluttony or avarice. He was captured by the absence of an alternative. Here, the film reveals the system’s cruelest aspect: those initially expelled are then captured even more easily because they no longer possess an anchor to resist. Haku becomes Yubaba’s tool. He performs wrongdoings (stealing Zeniba’s seal) because he has nothing left to lose. The susuwatari in Kamaji’s room represent a smaller variation of the same category: small soot spirits who, outside that space, would vanish because they no longer serve a function in modern Japan. Kamaji employs them because, without him, they would cease to exist. This constitutes solidarity among those the system has left behind.

And here the concept of the name enters. The first thing Yubaba does after the contract signing is manipulate Chihiro’s name. In Japanese, her name is 千尋, two characters meaning “a thousand fathoms.” Yubaba grasps the characters, tears away three pieces, leaving only one: 千, Sen. Chihiro becomes Sen. In Japan, this act constitutes real spiritual violence. The concept has a name: kotodama (言霊), the spirit of the word. The idea, present in texts from the eighth century, states that words carry real power. A name represents the anchor of one’s identity. To steal a name is to begin loosening a person from their own values.

This explains why the scene where Chihiro finds her farewell card from her school friends, with “Chihiro” written in large letters, holds such importance. She had already begun to forget. The card draws her back to herself. For Haku, it is too late for a card. His river was filled in. His parents, if they existed, vanished with the watercourse. No school friends remain to send him a note. Only Chihiro, now, is the sole person who can reconnect him to what he once was. And that will depend on her remembering his true name in time.

Photo: Dōgo Onsen Main Building, Matsuyama — one of Japan’s oldest bathhouses and a confirmed visual reference Miyazaki consulted for the Aburaya: its multi-storey wooden facade, lantern-lit corridors and ritual transaction at the entrance mirror the film’s bathhouse logic. Photo by Fraxinus2 / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons

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This is Part 1 of 2. → Continue to Part 2: Kaonashi Lives in All of Us