Esoteric Symbolism in The Boy and The Heron
The Boy and the Heron (2023) 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 these cute pillowy monsters described in the film as baby human souls. 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 physically resemble fish semen, shirako, literally “white children,” a culinary delicacy in Japan.
Warawara 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 very mystical: Human souls are rice spirits.
To understand why (Japanese) people are rice spirits, we have to look into the myth-history of Japan. According to the Kojiki, 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 Yahweh’s mother, Sophia, gifts humans a soul from the real “Father” in order to free us from Eden.
—Semen, Latin for ‘seed’. According to Japanese anthropologist and author of “Rice as Self,” Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Jimmu’s seed, aka white rice, was used to legitimize Japan’s monarchy, the purity of the blood, superiority of the race, and unique radiance of the Japanese skin. We are what we eat, after all, and Japanese rice is so beautiful! Tanizaki Junichiro: “Each grain is a pearl.” 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. In them myth, 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 semen.
The eighth century Kojiki and the Nihonshoki — the first written documents of Japan — are filled with references to rice grains as souls. When digested, they transfer soul to the consumer. In one story, the grain is birthed through the Sun’s sister, Ukemochi, the puking goddess, in charge of food. When Moon visits her Ukemochi, he becomes scared, pulls out his sword, 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 know feces makes 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 the warawara have to eat fish guts to grow!
Guts
More about guts: When Mahito is learning how to be helpful with Kiriko (a sequence that could be read as Mahito getting laid), he cuts open a fish and is overwhelmed by its guts. It’s one of the most beautiful and uncomfortable scenes in the film. Ghibli ero-guro, it recalls David Lynch’s Eraserhead baby flooding his house with feces, 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, cum, guts, and feces are the abode of soul, and yet scientists keep revealing just how important our gut microbiome is to our state of consciousness.
Nutritionally-rich and symbolically-rich warawara are seminal, cosmological, and scatological processes. They connect human soul to food, white rice, then to bird poop and bukkake, when during the final climax of the film (and there are several climaxes), everyone gets covered in white bird shit! (The white part is technically urine made of digested warawara). White stuff dripping down faces and chests means something very specific in Japanese culture. (See endnotes). Oddly, bird poop and semen have both been used cosmetically as facials in East Asia for years.
White Goo
“There is nothing else to eat.”
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. You can catch clips online. Like The Boy and the Heron, they are parables about the secrets of life and origins of consciousness.
Warawara are complex white-goo hieroglyphs. By using this mythopoeic language, the film suggests that the secret ingredient to creating human souls resembles angels pooping in reverse: we witness white (dead) liquid soul emerge out of the ground to then float up into the sky to become food. As the nobel Pelican says, there is nothing else for the gods to eat. Digested human souls then fall to the ground like rain to be reabsorbed and resecreted. In this imaginal world, everything is backwards. Birds eat babies instead of deliver them! I wonder if this is because humans eat bird eggs in our world.
Rice Paper
When we blur our eyes, warawara resemble the mesmerizing white flags circling above Natsuko’s delivery bed, circling like birds, like aliens. These streamers resemble shide, folded strips of rice-paper (semen-paper) that hang from rice-stalk “wara” ropes near shrines and torii gates. The word warawara likely comes from these ropes, as well as the word for ‘creepy-crawly,’ ‘laugh-out-loud’, and wareware, the honorific word for us/we, plural “I”.
The wara ropes with their 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 to the gods and an abstract version of Takashi Murakami’s 1998 NSFW sculpture Lonesome Cowboy.
Moreover, 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? Is this part of Mahito’s mythopoeic wet dream?
Blocks
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. Tama means soul and ball in Japanese. 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—is responding to the Buddhist one, where rice resembles sacred relics. In one story, 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 rice-relic complex was pushed in Japan by Kukai, founder of Shingon Buddhism—arguably the most “Japanese” form of Buddhism as a sythesis of Shinto and Tantric Indian. Kukai Kobo Daishi pushed the linguistic connection between rice and relic in Sanskrit, alongside rice’s boney materiality.
One strange medieval Shingon text even 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.” We’re from them. The continuity of the soul is compared to old seeds being planted and new seeds harvested. 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 shadowy spectral ancestors who arrive on ships digest the water monster’s 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.”
“The dead spirits are supposed to enter the rice.”
Semen Eating Rituals
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 promoted specific teachings about rice and semen magic. In one sect, the Tachikawa-ryu, a student eats his master’s semen as a means for mind-to-mind transmission. (Semen understood as, remember, 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, and semen is a type of food. “Men’s milk.”
Relatedly, 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 the soul. “Eat this so that I may live in you forever.” It’s not as weird as it sounds. Respected doctors and scientists, mostly male, in antiquity loved telling people about the value of semen and its relationship to life and the health of the body, mind, even memory. Both male and female bodies were believed to produce it, but only males made enough to pass on to their kin. Before microscopes, he contributed soul and bones, eyes—the white stuff—while she provided 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 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 was to enact the rice harvest ritual, Onamesai, which involves a mitama shizume “purification of the soul” where he 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. Did this happen to Mahito in the tower? 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 of the soul, on the other hand, generally believe it is unchanging, fully anchored in the body, and not tied to anything as terrestrial as eating and defecating.
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. It reminds me of the “letter-stones” passed between father and son in Departures (2008).
Food of the Angels
In analgous fashion, 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 means “what is it?” We don’t know, but a jar of it is supposedly kept within the Ark of the Covenant, right next to Aaron’s “budding rod.” (We should remember that sexual innuendoes are inherent in hieroglyphic languages such as paintings and fairy tales).
It’s the white stuff people survived on. Some scholars think manna, if it’s a literal food, could represent dehydrated milk, semen, or most likely insect poop, “honeydew,” collected on plants, which further strengthens the soul–rice–poop connection made in The Boy and the Heron.
Interestingly, the white part of rice is called endosperm, in Japanese, hainyuu, literally “ovule milk.” Rice replaces milk as a child’s “first food”, okuizome, after 100 days, and rice gruel looks just like semen. The three cultural substances, milk, rice, and cum, resonate in their pearliness and slimy textures, informing our brain experience of the white, gooy, warawara.
Funeral Food
We are what we eat, and rice is everyone’s first and last food—a funeral food or 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 also 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 Tantric 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, its arms fill your arms, and its body fills yours with luminous awareness. You can purportedly “feel” this vital essence drop right now as your “inner body.” That’s it! Then Buddhists imagine the dying process as the entier thing in reverse: The life-force withdraws back into the center of the body, shrinking down into a tiny white blob who floats up the spine 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 many Buddhist temples. Some say it’s the shape of a reliquary. It looks to me like a warawara on fire.
Babies
When we zoom out, there’s a possibility that the warawara storyline is ‘mythic,’ a vision of millions of years of evolution compressed into a single image; a coded visual recap of all life on this planet—maybe even panspermia. They arrive in a stone, after all! In the spirit of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” the stages of the warawara could 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 does read like a embryology textbook. Not sure if it matters, but 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 previous levels of evolution, which means we are, deep down, plants.
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. Miyazaki sees them everyday. As a stack of balanced shapes, gorinto resemble Great Uncle’s world, his precarious blocks, and they represent sai-no-kawara, the stacked rocks dead children in hell are forced to make for causing so much suffering on the surface. 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 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.
Then, behind all this, warawara represent the subliminal superimposition of dreams from an alien meteorite collaborating with everyone including Great Uncle.
Happy Endings
How do Ya’ll live? The film is telling us that we are, deep down, space, sperm, egg, food, feces, stone, water, and reincarnating Buddhas all at once. We are also extremely subtle, lighter than air grain spirits, 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 with their opposite, poop, the most disgusting, abject, monstrous substance of all.
Endnotes
•Bukkake, literally “splash” is a food term and Kazuhiko Matsumoto’s 1998 term for the Japanese pornography trend. Images of breasts and faces dripping in cum 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?
•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 on Zelda’s Gloom that connects the blood-red dripping hands in Tears of the Kingdom to the countless drawings from victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of bloody hands falling off the muscles of people reaching out from the water.
•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.
•Huiastudios convincingly argues that the heron is Mahito’s penis, its pink nose is the glans emerging out of the fleshy beak, an erection that intrudes on Mahito’s reality. I imagine, after his mother-figure barges in, he lied and said the white stuff on the window sill must be heron poop.
•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 beings and turns those signals into art.
•Where did the alien meteorite come from? Stones, especially ones that fall to earth, are often considered “gods” in the Japanese imagination, (and the Abrahamic imagination, considering the Black Stone in Mecca is a meteorite). More specifically, stones are places where a god can dwell, which is an idea that leads to stones that are animate and can grow like crystals. We see this take shape in Japanese rock gardens, and the Japanese national anthem about stones growing into boulders. Stones are like seeds and seeds are like stones. Warawara are more like bubbles; the opposite end 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. This is why the moon is almost never in the same sky as the sun.
•We humans are spirits, but also turn to stone as we get older. We 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.