This study analyzes the archetypal conflict structure inherent in Hayao Miyazaki's animated films through the opposition between Amatsukami (heavenly deities) and Kunitsukami (earthly deities) in Japanese Kiki (記紀) mythology, and the structure of Kuniyuzuri (land-cession myth). While previous studies focused on the binary opposition between Amaterasu and Susanoo, explaining the ‘emergence of conflict,’ this research employs the more fundamental mythological system of Amatsukami and Kunitsukami, along with the concrete narrative structure of Kuniyuzuri, to comprehensively elucidate both the conflict and the ‘modes of resolution.’ The analysis covers four works: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away.The analysis reveals that the Amatsukami-Kunitsukami opposition manifests as multi-layered conflicts of ‘heaven and earth,’ ‘civilization and nature,’ and ‘dominant center and indigenous periphery,’ operating across dimensions of spatiality, power, and ecology. In the early works Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, the Amatsukami power represented by technological civilization collapses through its own contradictions while the Kunitsukami vitality recovers, demonstrating a reversed Kuniyuzuri structure. In the later works Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, the loss of divine form follows a dialectical structure, leading to sublimation into omnipresent life force or recovery of identity. This study reconceptualizes Miyazaki's terms ‘lower gods’ and ‘higher gods’ mentioned in Turning Point 1997-2008 into the scholarly concepts of ‘embodied gods (形體神)’ and ‘omnipresent gods (遍在神).’ The transformation from an embodied god to an omnipresent god requires not merely the loss of form, but the simultaneous preservation or recovery of essence (identity and authority). Shishigami, upon being beheaded and losing its form, released its life force throughout the forest, sublimating into an omnipresent god. Haku suffered a dual deprivation of both his river (form) and his name (essence), but recovered his invisible divinity when Chihiro restored his name. This reinterprets the core of the Kuniyuzuri myth—'transition from the visible world to the invisible world'—at an ontological level. This mythological appropriation serves as both a reflection on Japanese society's loss of nature and indigenous culture through modernization, and an attempt to rethink the relationship between humans and nature in an era of ecological crisis, proposing the possibility of coexistence through a plurality of modes of being rather than unilateral victory.
Ki Hong Kim (Sat,) studied this question.