Studio Ghibli is known for its confident, adventurous girl characters—from Nausicaä and Shizuku to Kiki and Sophie, Ghibli has consistently presented wide-ranging representation for teens and pre-teens which had long been lacking not just in East Asian media but also worldwide.
Womanhood, however, is a much more complex matter in Ghibli films. Whilst several mothers in these animes manage to pursue further education (e.g. Whisper of the Heart, 1995, From Up on Poppy Hill, 2011), this consistently comes at a cost for the eldest girl child of their family, withholding them from socialising and play or increasing their already significant work commitments. Though these daughters never complain, presumably in support of their mothers, increasing opportunities for women in post-war Japan are not presented as good unto themselves.
Moreover, the majority of mature women characters do not experience the privilege of further study. There are some examples of contented housewives in the Studio Ghibli repertoire, for instance the Bamboo Cutter’s Wife in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) and Osono in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), however Ghibli films are punctuated by women’s frustration at absentee husbands and fathers (Ponyo, 2008) and their helplessness in the face of a patriarchal social order.
Nowhere is this truer than for Seita and Setsuko Yokokawa’s aunt in Grave of the Fireflies (1988), a film which primarily follows the victimisation of a whole family by the Allies and Imperial Japan. Aunt begins by accepting her socially-endowed maternal role, taking Seita and Setsuko in when their mother is hospitalised due to fire-bomb burns and subsequently dies.
However, when her family begins to feel the pinch as the War progresses, Aunt forces Seita to source his own rice and complains about the siblings’ growing appetites. When the siblings play music together, Aunt states that Seita is a pest and should be in school or working for the war effort like her husband and daughter. Seita begins to cook for himself, but Aunt takes this as a personal affront and grumbles at Seita leaving dishes in the sink.
Nonetheless, there may be more to Aunt than first meets the eye. Freud would see Aunt’s behaviour as a typical case of housewife psychosis (Hausfrauenpsychose). Translated through a feminist lens, Aunt might be viewed thus: Feeling trapped in her role at home whilst her husband and daughter are out all day working and fearful that the unreliable food supply will fail, she lashes out at the only targets available to her, which unfortunately happen to be helpless orphans.
Hausfrauenpsychose does not absolve Aunt of all blame, however it does prompt more understanding for a woman cooped up inside away from the realities of war, her imagination the only mode of apprehension of the many horrors of World War Two.
Seita comes to find Aunt’s behaviour intolerable and the siblings move out and try to fend for themselves, leading first to Setsuko’s and then Seita’s deaths. Aunt seems to genuinely soften when the siblings leave, however she makes no attempt to stop them and is not mentioned again throughout the film.
Whilst the Yokokawas’ experiences are truly horrific (as seen in the film’s graphic scenes of death), Aunt undergoes her own kind of suffering caused by her artificial distancing from the War and the unattainable public sphere it represents. Forced into the role of housewife which she rejects, she ends up causing the deaths of two orphaned innocents who had nowhere else to turn.
Ultimately, Grave of the Fireflies offers only three maternal monographs: the dying or dead mother, the invested but fleeting mother-figure (Mother’s friend) and the anxious, irritable Aunt who can only imagine the horrors of World War Two and, scared her family will not survive it, is hesitant to share.
Setsuko never gets to grow into a woman, however Grave of the Fireflies and many other Ghibli films suggest that if she had, the process would have been a painful one. Women may have more freedoms now than they did in Imperial Japan, yet the transition to maturity remains a struggle for the girls of Ghibli as well as for real-life girls vying for autonomy in a world of men.