Women in Sandakan 8 and Princess Mononoke

            Films have an unfortunate tendency to use women’s bodies as additional visual entertainment for male audiences. However, I believe Sandakan 8 and Princess Mononoke are two examples of films that present women that are interesting regardless of their appearance onscreen. Each film takes their own approach to expressing issues with the position of women in society and the female characters of these two films represent completely different backgrounds and conditions.

            The key female roles in Sandakan 8 are Keiko and Osaki. Osaki is the character I believe people would most generally remember from this film as the plot is essentially concerned more with Osaki’s life than Keiko’s. Osaki is an interesting character because the film leaves us with the impression that she is tricked into her oppressive environment. While she did choose to leave in order to get money for her family, she was unlike a character such as Songlian from Raise the Red Lantern who chose a life she knew would be troubled in order to help her family. Initially, this seems to place Osaki as a somewhat weaker female character, but in actuality she chooses to fight her situation more than Songlian.

            Osaki vehemently refuses to have sex with the first client she is given. It is only after multiple clients with seemingly no one around to take her side that Osaki starts to lose the will to fight. She’s also really not sexualized to any degree as Songlian is in the first couple of nights as she’s given a soft focus shot with her sitting there on the bed. The camera essentially maintains our connection with Osaki as a person to place ourselves in as we constantly follow behind her and limit the amount of shots that “gaze” upon her. Osaki also manages to turn the tables a little when she takes a dominant position with the boy who visits her because she is Japanese. The boy doesn’t push her for sex like the other clients and Osaki instead attempts to get him to stay and sleep with her.

            Within the prostitution house, we get a little bit of a look at female camaraderie in film. Osaki doesn’t appear to make any strong friendships, but the women are distraught when one gets sent away to a new location. Actually, when Osaki initially arrives, the women already in the house seem hardly helpful as they give her a false sense of security that everything will be fine. The women at the beginning of Osaki’s time at the house almost seem to enjoy what they do. The strongest female connection we get within Osaki’s story is between her and the older mentor figure that watches over the girls at the house. Only near the end of her time at the house do we get this maternal figure that keeps Osaki’s hope alive until she passes away and Osaki is left to defend herself again. She gets the chance to return the favor when she becomes the maternal figure to Keiko.

            Keiko herself is a character that I wish saw a bit more development in Sandakan 8. We get the sense that she’s a strong female character mostly just from learning that she’s a journalist working to get this story about Osaki and women like her all on her own. I don’t think she really gets a chance to make a stand somewhere for what she believes in. She’s primarily the recorder of Osaki’s vibrant story. It is important to look at how much she cares about Osaki that she tells her she stayed to get a story from her. In a way she was sort of using Osaki’s pain for journalistic achievement and she admits this courageously to Osaki. I suppose in a way, she is bringing Osaki’s story to the surface in order to make a statement about how these women were treated.

            Though Osaki is ostracized for a life she was forced into, Keiko seems to be fairly well off and (at least in the film) she appears to work on even ground with the men in her life as can be seen when she leads a group to find the graves Osaki mentioned in her story. It’s odd then that the film seems to put an emphasis on the past and less on a continuing story of female oppression. There is the scene where Keiko is almost raped by a strange man that wanders onto Osaki’s property, but all in all Keiko doesn’t seem to suffer much of the same oppression as Osaki. Her husband appears to respect her as do her coworkers. The only negative reception she gets is from the local people who don’t approve of her journalistic ways.

            Princess Mononoke offers the same kind of strong interesting females, albeit under completely different conditions. First, there’s the princess herself, San. San is odd in that she really doesn’t have much of a character. She barely speaks and her expressions mostly consist of disdainful looks aimed at Ashitaka and the people of Irontown. Still, she differs from the average film female in that she really is not presented as attractive visual “eye candy.” Some may see her as cute, but you really have to keep in mind the first image the viewer gets of San is her sucking and spitting out blood from a giant wolf. This doesn’t even qualify as sexualized vampire material. San is drawing blood from her mother with her mouth. Also, throughout most of the beginning of the film, she wears an ambiguous mask that effectively hides the fact that she is female. Her angry disposition towards Ashitaka and the Irontown residents may lead some to call her a femme fatale figure of the film noir fame. She is aggressive towards the male characters and doesn’t appear to back down. However, unlike those typical femme fatale figures, she is purely a figure of rage. She never softens at any point. Even by the end of the film, she hasn’t really changed her stance about the forest or about humans (no one in the film truly seems to change their ways). She mutually agrees to part ways with Ashitaka and all we’re left with is the notion that she probably won’t attack Ashitaka again. If Irontown proves to be a problem again, I doubt it will take her long to strike back.  

            Lady Eboshi of Irontown, is a bit more developed as a female character. She’s not the typical greedy film villain trying to extend her reach to all she can see. She takes care of the lepers, gives the women positions to work in the forge, and watches over her men in battle (to some degree at least). Though some may quickly denounce Eboshi as manipulating these people for ulterior motives, I can’t shake the feeling that all she does concerning the forest is really in the best interest of getting Irontown and its people to flourish. There’s valuable resources in the forest and she wants Irontown to grow. When San and the forest creatures attack, Eboshi is incited even more to lash back and quell the forces of the forest. They present a danger to Eboshi’s people and she wants to minimize that danger. When Jigo asks for her to assist him in killing the forest spirit, Eboshi is ready to assist him probably because she believes in doing so she can effectively stop the legions of the forest from attacking Irontown. 

Eboshi could also be a maternal figure, but to me she’s a little too cold to appear as a mother to anyone in Irontown. This is what makes her so unique. She doesn’t seem to fit into any one stereotype. To return to the idea of sexualized women onscreen, Eboshi’s dress is so conservative and her personality is so fierce, that there’s little there to focus a “male gaze” upon.  The only issue with Eboshi as a female character is that there is really little about her that is female. It’s as if she shed everything female in order to maintain her power, which could be a statement about how women have to adapt within a patriarchy. Eboshi just isn’t quite the same as Osaki who manages to remain distinctly female and have a level of courage and strength that separates her from stereotypical female film roles.

            The real difference between these two films in portraying women is that one of them, Sandakan 8, is about the real story of a historical woman. Therefore, Osaki is just much more of a strong believable female character than any of the female characters in Princess Mononoke. San and Eboshi are still interesting in how they deviate from typical female roles in film, but they’re still fictional and there’s the catch that they were created from a male mind. Yes, Sandakan 8 had a male director, but it was based on the work of a female writer that captured the history of a real historical woman that really went through the events of the film. Fictional characters just can’t match up with that kind of realism from a film like Sandakan 8.