“ From Myth to Modernity: Cultural Memory, Shinto Symbolism, and National Identity in Your Name and Spirited Away”

This study examines how Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (2016) and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) mobilize Shinto symbolism as a framework for encoding cultural memory and constructing modern Japanese national identity. Both films deploy liminal sacred spaces, purification rituals, and the concept of musubi to negotiate the tension between tradition and postindustrial modernity. Spirited Away employs the bathhouse as a site of spiritual pollution and ethical restoration, while Your Name uses shrine ritual and disaster memory to recover communal continuity across fractured time. Read through the lenses of cultural memory theory and film studies, the two films reveal anime as a living archive of inherited myth, one actively revised for contemporary Japan rather than simply preserved. Together, they demonstrate that national identity in modern Japanese visual culture is not a departure from mythic foundations but an ongoing, politically inflected dialogue with them (Napier 241; Hardacre 1; Cavallaro 78; LaMarre 193; Osmond 54). In Spirited Away, the specific use of the water element within the bathhouse serves as a physical medium for this Shinto-inflected restoration, acting as a symbolic analogy for the arduous process of maturing and reclaiming agency in modern Japan . This process is further complicated by the folkloric mechanism of name-theft, where the ability to control others by knowing and altering their “true names” functions as a direct narrative threat to individual autonomy and historical continuity . Consequently, the act of remembering one’s original name amidst a host of mystical creatures becomes the ultimate test of identity, transforming Shinto motifs from aesthetic background elements into the essential gears of the characters’ psychological maturation. By navigating this mysterious spirit world populated by entities from the depths of Japanese folklore, the protagonists must consciously choose to reconnect with their heritage to escape a state of spiritual or literal imprisonment . (Boyd 7; followthemoonrabbit 5; sabukaru 11; amazingstories 16). The “Japan-ness” of the spirit world in Spirited Awayis rooted in an ancient polytheistic religion that interprets various parts of the natural world as possessing spirits, including those that may solely intend destruction. In Your Name, this spiritual logic is manifested through the wondrous journey of Taki and Mitsuha, where the lakeside setting of rural Itomori acts as a vital repository for traditional motifs that contrast sharply with the urban anonymity of Tokyo. Shinkai’s specific representation of the countryside and gender serves as a narrative vehicle to analyze national discourses, suggesting that the recovery of a stable identity is inextricably linked to the survival of these regional ritual spaces. This intersection of animism and post humanism allows both films to function as top-ranked cinematic achievements that facilitate a necessary reimagining of the human-nature relationship within a contemporary post-disaster context. Ultimately, by grounding these fantastical adventures in the recognizable “way of the Gods,” the directors provide a symbolic framework for audiences to navigate the complexities of modern secular life through the lens of ancient spiritual bonds. (Miyazaki 21; anime manga studies 3; fantasy-animation 30; tandfonline 13; conncoll 31).

کلیدواژه ها:

Cultural memory ، Shinto symbolism ، national identity ، anime ، liminality .