그대들은 어떻게 살 것인가: The film is telling us that we are, deep down, somehow, stone, sperm, egg, food, feces, bubbles, and reincarnating Buddhas all at once
https://davidtitterington.medium.com/esoteric-symbolism-in-the-boy-and-the-heron-1dfe9ab60e6a
Esoteric Symbolism in The Boy and The Heron.
How do Ya’ll live?
The Boy and the Heron visualizes a number of cool Japanese beliefs, including this idea of a botanical level of the human soul.
Jimmu’s Seed
We begin with the warawara, who are pillowy monsters described in the film as baby human souls, and on a design level, they resemble popular Japanese characters with little legs, like Kapibara-san, Sumikko Gurashi, and Mameshiba, but on a symbolic level, they represent sperm — DNA — as they gather to form helixes to survive. It’s interesting that in the story they ultimately become food, because they also resemble real-world fish semen shirako literally “white children,” a culinary delicacy in Japan.
They represent sperm—pure information, pure chemistry—but they look more like rice grains, and they’re born from the leaves of plants. This is where the film reveals something even more mystical: Human souls are rice spirits.
To understand (Japanese) people as rice spirits we have to look into the history of Japan. Around 500 BC, pearly white stuff landed on a mountain top in northern Kyushu alongside Jimmu, Japan’s first emperor, “grandson of the gods,” a Farmer-King. The white seed was gifted to Jimmu by his Grandmother, The Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, who cultivated it in her heavenly fields. (We’ve left history and entered myth.) The grain is sometimes referred to as Jimmu’s Father. It might be worth noting that there is a Gnostic version of genesis where Sophia, God’s mother, gifts humans a soul from the real “Father” in order to free us from Eden.
—Semen, from Latin, literally ‘seed’. According to Japanese anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Jimmu’s seed will be used to legitimize Japan’s monarchy, the purity of the blood, superiority of the race, and radiance of the skin. We are what we eat, and Japanese rice is so beautiful! The great writer Tanizaki Junichiro: “Each grain is a pearl.” The warawara look like pearls… pearl necklaces.
In other words, in the mythic imagination, pearly white rice is petrified soul delivered to the people through the ancestral land—itself understood as self-hardening Onogogo god ejaculate. The Japanese islands fell to earth like lava from the tip of “God’s rod.” Soul comes from semen, semen comes from rice, and rice is God’s semen.
The eighth century Kojiki and the Nihonshoki — the first written documents of Japan — are filled with references to rice grains as souls and kami. When digested, they transfer soul to the consumer. In one story, the fatherly grain is birthed through the Sun’s sister, the puking goddess, Ukemochi, in charge of foods. In the story, when Moon visits her he becomes scared of Ukemochi, cuts her open, and as she dies, all kinds of grains come out of her orifices. Rice comes out of her guts, which is where the soul was believed to come from; it’s where the fetus grows, and where food turns into blood, into life. (And farmers knew feces made great fertilizer). According to Ohnuki-Tierney, this is why Japanese ritual suicide, seppuku, involves cutting open the stomach, hara-kiri. Opening the stomach releases the soul. This is probably why warawara must eat fish guts to grow!
Guts
More about guts: When Mahito is learning how to be helpful, he cuts open a fish and is overwhelmed by its guts. This recalls David Lynch’s Eraserhead baby and Yukio Mishima’s famous description of hara-kiri from Patriotism (1961): “The entrails burst through, as if the wound too were vomiting.”
And yes, at first, it sounds kind of crazy that in Japan, guts and feces are the abode of soul? That’s inverted, ridiculous, sacrilege, and yet scientists keep revealing just how important our gut microbiome is to our state of consciousness.
Nutritionally and symbolically rich Warawara are seminal, agricultural, cosmological, and scatological processes. They connect human soul to white rice, bird poop, and bukkake, when during the final climax of the film (there are several), everyone gets covered in bird shit! The white part of bird shit is technically urine made of digested warawara. We must remember that white stuff dripping down faces and chests means something very specific in Japanese visual culture (see endnotes).
“There is nothing else to eat.”
White Goo
Warawara are complex 4D hieroglyphs— from hieros, “sacred,” and glyphein, “to carve.” By using this heiroglyphic language, the film hints that the secret creation of human souls resembles angels pooping in reverse: we witness white liquid souls come up out of the ground to then float up into the sky to become food. There is nothing else for the gods to eat. Digested souls then fall to the ground like rain to be reabsorbed and resecreted. In this world, everything is backwards. Birds eat babies instead of deliver them. (I wonder, is this because humans eat bird eggs in our world?).
Warawara physically resemble bird poop and ‘white goo’ in general (black goo’s twin?), and I’m not sure if it matters, but they look like the magical seed-worlds depicted in Miyazaki’s The Day I Bought a Star (2006), a short film, and the titular characters in Mr. Dough and Egg Princess (2010), both meant only to be seen at the Ghibli Museum. Like The Boy and the Heron, they are parables about the secrets of life and origins of consciousness.
Rice Paper
When we blur our eyes, warawara resemble the mesmerizing white flags above Natsuko’s delivery bed, circling like birds, like aliens. These streamers are like the ones called shide in Japan, folded strips of rice-paper (semen-paper) that hang from rice-stalk “wara” ropes everywhere “sacred”, especially near or from sacred torii gates. The word warawara likely comes from these ropes, as well as the word for ‘creepy-crawly,’ ‘laugh-out-loud’ (笑笑), and wareware, the honorific word for “us.”
The wara ropes with white shide are more commonly called shimenawa, and might as well be symbolic of penis and semen. Likewise, the gohei ritual ‘wand’ used by Shinto priests, dressed all in white, is a wooden pole with a bunch of shide dangling from its tip. The white drips also look like bird shit, which is funny because the word for gate, torii, literally means “where the birds are.” 鳥居。
Wara ropes and shide make any space, object, or person a sacred gate. They mark a possible location for a god. Sumo wrestlers wear shimenawa belts with dangling shide as an invitation and abstract version of Takashi Murakami’s 1998 NSFW sculpture Lonesome Cowboy.
The streamers look like toilet paper as they wrap Natsuko and Mahito up like mummies. “Mommy!” What kind of ritual is going on in this secret room/teminos?
On top of all these complicated Japanese symbols are the tiny white “building blocks” that fill the wrinkly stone that floats in front of Great Uncle’s head like his one remaining testicle. Layered metaphors create a ‘deep map’ of cultural signs, erotic dreams, personal archetypes, and legit memories from lost time. This is a fairy tale after all, and Miyazaki, being a sensitive artist, is picking up on signals from the deep.
Relics
Seeds are like living stones. The Shinto view of life’s origin—of Jimmu, Goddesses, and rice-spirits and strange rituals—is responding to the Buddhist one, where rice resembles sacred relics. In one myth-history, the cremated body of the fully god/fully man Shakyamuni Buddha left behind a handful of tiny crystals that look just like rice. Some claim they are rice (and some say Bodhidharma’s eyelids become tea plants). This idea of a relic-rice complex was pushed in Japan by Kukai, founder of Shingon Buddhism, who supported it by a linguistic connection between rice and relic in Sanskrit, alongside rice’s boney materiality.
One strange medieval text anthropomorphizes rice to connect it to death and sex. From the Kanjō inmyō kuketsu: “The relics of the Buddhas of the past change into rice grains, and the rice grains engage in sexual acts to perpetuate the existence of sentient beings.” The continuity of the soul is compared to old seeds being planted and new seeds harvested. It’s like karma. The Great Uncle would have read famous Japanese treatises that also describe the future Buddha, Maitreya, as taking the form of rice-relics: “This true body is none other than the relic, which is the dhātu, the realm of enlightenment.”
The soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
~ George Santayana.
Semen/Soul Eating Rituals
I think it’s interesting that, according to Miyazaki’s film, shadowy spectral ancestors digest the monster poop for us. Our souls must eat ghost excrement to grow. We are not only food, we are spirits who need to eat, spirits who themselves are believed to be the end product of digestion—the clarified cream, or ghee of the rice.
There is no inside and outside. In this unconscious space of lost memory, substances like semen, rice, milk, blood, bones, relics, food, even ghosts, are not separate entities but permutations of each other. Fluids inside the body mix with and relate to fluids outside the body, and they all support life and consciousness.
Anthropologist Steven Trenson says, “In fact, the [Shingon] text clearly suggests that the souls of the dead are at the same time in the grains and that by offering or eating cooked rice empowered by a mantra, one can prevent these souls from becoming hungry ghosts and instead cause them to be reborn in Maitreya’s paradise.” The idea that rice is not just food for the dead but also the very abode of their souls goes back to India, Trenson adds, where, “ten rice balls are offered for ten days after death to allow the deceased to acquire a new body and escape becoming a hungry ghost.” Ideally,
“The dead spirits are supposed to enter the rice.”
Rice is soul, is “living water.” Mahito manages to smuggle out a pearly piece of his great uncle’s world, and it’s interesting that Shingon Buddhism, arguably the most esoteric and “Japanese” form of Buddhism (Kukai was first a Shinto priest) promoted specific teachings about rice and semen magic. In sect Tachikawa-ryu, a student eats his master’s semen as a means for mind-to-mind transmission. (Semen as clarified rice). There is also a theory that originally, after an emperor died, the new one had to literally eat (or just bite) part of the previous emperor’s corpse to fully receive the lineage. Continuity involves food rituals, and humans are a type of food. Semen is a type of food. “Men’s milk.”
Tangentially, the church father Epiphanius reported that early Christians practiced semen eating rituals. The Borborites believed semen was truly the Eucharistic body-blood of Christ our God (Panarion, 4,3 p.85–86), and to never “waste the seed.” Members of the modern St. Priapus Church consume semen “as a form of worship,” and Clement de Saint Marcq (1906) presents a convincing argument as to why Jesus asked his disciples to eat his jizz or “living water” at the last supper. It’s soul. “Eat this so that I may live in you forever.” It’s not as weird as it sounds. Male doctors and scientists in antiquity loved telling people about the value semen and it’s relationship to life, continuity, the health of the body and the mind. Both male and female bodies were believed to produce it, but only males made enough to pass it on to their kin. Before microscopes, he contributed soul and bones, the white stuff, while she provide the red blood and flesh. Can we blame people for believing this? The patriarchy, but also the materiality of semen— its oily, pearly shininess — was a testament to its divinity. Semen’s resemblance to rice sealed the deal in Japan. There is also a folk medical note that “six bowls of rice creates one drop of semen.”
Ohnuki-Tierney points out that the key role of the Japanese emperor didn’t have to do with the military but was to enact the rice harvest ritual, Onamesai, which involves a mitama shizume “purification of the soul” where the emperor lies down on a “secret bed,” and then two women, “receive the emperor’s soul that is departing from his body and renew it”. That’s obviously sexual. We should note that Japanese writers like to emphasize that from a Shinto worldview, the “soul” can easily separate from the body at any time, waxes and wanes like the moon, and needs to eat. Western conceptions, Judeo-Christian, or Abrahmaic souls, on the other hand, are generally unchanging, fully anchored in the body, and aren’t tied to anything terrestrial as eating and defecating. Do warawara defecate?
In any case, the symbolism in the film more likely connects the building block in Mahito’s pocket to a souvenir memento, an omamori protector charm, protecting memories. In this sense it reminds me of the “letter-stones” passed between father and son in Departures (2008).
Food of the Angels
The Jewish version may be the mystical white manna, the food of the angels (Ps 78:25), the bread of heaven (Ex 16:4), the white stuff God fed his chosen people in the desert when there was nothing else to eat. The Hebrew word meaning “what is it?”, well, a jar of it is supposedly kept within the Ark of the Covenant, right next to Aaron’s “budding rod.”
It’s white stuff people had to survive on. Some scholars think manna, if it’s a literal food, could represent semen, dehydrated milk, or most likely insect poop, “honeydew,” collected on plants, which further strengthens the soul–rice–poop connection made in The Boy and the Heron.
Interestinly, the white part of rice is called endosperm, and in Japanese endosperm is hainyuu, literally “ovule milk.” Rice replaces milk as a child’s “first food”, okuizome, after 100 days, and rice gruel looks like semen. The two cultural substances resonate in their pearliness and texture, informing our neurochemical brain experience of the white warawara.
Funeral Food
We are what we eat, and in Japan rice is everyone’s first and last food—it’s a funeral food and mortuary object. Great Uncle is dying after all, and rice’s centrality in Japanese funerals informs his fantasies of warawara. Stuart E. Thompson, in Death, Food, and Fertility (1987), points out how rice in East Asia associates with bones and “ancestral stuff” not only because it’s white and hard, but because it’s grown on the land inherited from our ancestors. He adds that bones and rice are “connected directly to your ancestors through your father’s semen.” At funerals, “the transmission from deceased to heirs is often symbolized in terms of apportioning rice.”
Food and bones relate in the most important Japanese ritual, the kotsu-age, when chopsticks are used to transfer bones from the cremation box into the urn, then the same chopsticks are inserted into a heaping bowl of cooked rice and left erect, (something never done outside of a funeral. It’s taboo).
Before that happens, sometimes the makura kazari “pillowside decoration” is offered to the corpse and includes a bowl of rice, rice dumplings, and rice paper. It must remain next to the body for three days. Then rice and its many products become the perpetual food for ghosts through local shrines and fancy living room alcoves.
Liquid Seed
Buddhists don’t really believe in a “soul” per se, but instead describe a “vital essence-drop” that is spread throughout the body “in numerous subtle channels as the support for life and consciousness.” In Tanric Buddhist practices, mikkyo, one imagines this radiant jewel of white liquid light descending from the sky and entering the body through the top of the head, dropping down into the stomach, planting itself, then growing in size until its legs fill your legs and its arms fill your arms and its entire body fills yours with luminous awareness. You can purportedly “feel” this vital essence drop right now as your “inner body.” Then Buddhists imagine the dying process as this in reverse. The life-force withdraws back into the center of the body, shrinking down into a tiny white blob who floats up and leaves out the top of the head like a warawara. This extremely subtle, seminal, dream drop/white-goo magic body remains in limbo for 49 days until it re-enter a womb if it’s lucky. Light a candle for it! Warawara are arguably a cartoony version of this “thigle” drop essence, the same teardrop shape atop a gorinto five-ring totem called the kuurin, “space ring,” and the same flaming jewel kaen houju on top of Buddhist temples. Some say it’s the shape of a reliquary. It’s a warawara on fire.
Babies
When we zoom out, there’s a possibility that the warawara storyline is mythic, a mythic vision, millions of years of evolution compressed into a single image, like a visual recap of all life on this planet, even panspermia (they arrive in a stone, after all). In the spirit of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” the stages of the warawara could even represent stages of a fetus in the womb. Medieval Japanese authors remarked on how the germinating rice grain resembles a germinating human fetus, and the wikipedia description of endosperm reads like a embryology textbook. Relatedly, the Hopi call humans, “corn walking,” and the influential Greek physician, Claudius Galen, taught that the human embryo is more vegetable than animal. “The fetus has first of all the vegetative power… Look at it this way: this plant is going to become an animal not by losing the power that it had from the beginning, but by acquiring another one.” We ‘transcend but include’ all previouse levels of evolution.
White rice, white warawawa, white building blocks, white semen, white milk, white bones, white relics, and white bird poop all resonate within the Japanese imagination to become symbolic siblings related to the Imperial soul and the body of Buddha. White is also the Japanese color for death.
Stacking Stones
Lining all these themes and symbols up in the imagination, the entire story starts to resemble a five-ring gorinto totem, the striking 3D cosmograms used in memorials and Japanese cemeteries. As a stack of balanced shapes, gorinto resemble Great Uncle’s world, his precarious white blocks, and they represent sai-no-kawara, the stacked rocks dead children in hell are forced to make for causing so much suffering. If they can complete three stacks, they get out of hell, but demons keep showing up to knock them down! (Pelicans keep showing up to destroy the warawara towers). This is why Japanese people stack stones in gardens and sacred sites, and is one reason gorinto look like stacked stones. Through some form of sympathetic magic, we on the surface can help baby souls by stacking stones ourselves. At the very least, it distracts the demons!
I love the symmetry, where high in his tower above, Great Uncle is decorated in the eyes from the monsters below. He sits like Rodin’s The Thinker—who is Dante sitting atop his Gates of Hell, and can see how all these symbols visualize a complicated network of Japanese beliefs. They also represent the subliminal superimposition of dreams from an alien meteorite collaborating with everyone including Great Uncle.
Happy Endings
The film is telling us that we are, deep down, somehow, stone, sperm, egg, food, feces, bubbles, and reincarnating Buddhas all at once. We are also extremely subtle, lighter than air, in the world but not of it, fermented bubbles of joyful awareness along for one hell of a ride. Take a deep breath! In a mere two hours of film, Miyazaki brings together all these religious Japanese symbols and poop, the most abject, monstrous substance of all. If art is prophetic, then what do you think the film is preparing us for? Please share your ideas in the comments.
Endnotes
Bukkake, literally “splash” is a food term and Kazuhiko Matsumoto’s 1998 term for the Japanese pornography trend. Images of breasts and faces covered in semen appear on magazine covers in convenience stores. It’s a work-around for the censorship laws. The silly Japanese joke is there at the climax of the film, and the characters are elated!
It’s gross but also funny and apparently good luck to get shit on by birds in Japan. The experience is so rare — comparable to being born in a precious human body?
Tama is the word for ball, soul, and can also mean testicle.
Bird poop and semen have been used cosmetically as facials for years.
Now we know that thoughts and brain states all flow in spiral patterns around attractor basins in the brain. Maybe this is why warawara float around that way.
For more on Japanese goo monsters, see my essay Gloom that connects the dripping hands in Tears of the Kingdom to the dripping hands found in drawings of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At one point, Mahito takes cooked rice up to his bedroom and uses it as glue for his arrow. Great Uncle likewise uses white building blocks to ‘glue’ his worlds together. (See black goo tar and pitch).
You know Japanese relic worship is at another level. Part of their national identity rests on the possession of three secret regalia: The Three Imperial treasures: a jewel, mirror, and sword, all shrouded in mystery and locked away in safes. No one has ever seen them and lived. Likewise, Kukai, over a thousand years old, is believed to still be sitting in subtle meditation behind a door in Koya-san that must never be opened. Like Bentham’s panopticon, the sacred objects don’t even have to be there to work. In fact, they are intensely present and powerful precisely because they are absent.
See DanielVolovets analysis of Kiriko and Himi for great insight. Himi’s fire kills warawara (intentionally?) which could imply abortions.
The imagination is perhaps better understood as an ‘imaginal realm’, like an etheric film that mediates the terrestrial and spiritual domains, or like a vibrating field linking mind and soul that picks up on subtle patterns, subtle beings, and turns those signals into art.
Where did the alien meteorite come from? Stones, especially ones that fall to earth, are “gods” in the Japanese imagination, and Abrahamic, considering the Black Stone is a meteorite. More specifically, stone are places where a god can dwell, which is an idea that arguably leads to a stones that are animate and can grow like crystals. We see this take shape in Japanese rock gardens, and the national anthem about stones growing into boulders. Stones are like seeds and seeds are like stones. Warawara are more like bubbles. The oposite of a stone.
We should note that in the Puking Goddess myth, Moon’s violent action against Ukemochi is why his sister, the Sun, doesn’t want to see him anymore. Sometimes he’s allowed near her.
We humans are spirits, but also turn to stone as we get older, dry out, and die. Humans are infected with what alchemists describe as a ‘hardening spirit.’ For more on this, see Let’s Rock.
For more on rice spirits and Japanese traditions, see Sake and the Soul.
If you want to read more about rice in Japanese religions, check out Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s 2003 book Rice as Self and Steven Trenson’s 2018 article “Rice, Relics, and Jewels” in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol 45, subtitled The Social Lives and Afterlives of Sacred Things in Japan. I also read The Body (1987) by Yasuo Yuasa, and The Body as Spirit (1975) by Ishikawa Hiroshi, who both argue that the Japanese body is experienced first-hand not as a heavy meat object but as a bright space and opening, like a spirit, lighter than air.
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