Lady Eboshi runs Iron Town. She mines iron from the mountains, smelts it into weapons, and sells it to feudal warlords. To do this, she is systematically destroying the ancient forest that surrounds her settlement, cutting down trees and killing the animal gods who protect them. She is Princess Mononoke's antagonist. She is also the person who took in lepers when nobody else would, freed women from brothels and gave them jobs, and built the closest thing to an egalitarian society that exists in Miyazaki's medieval Japan. Lady Eboshi is the most morally complicated character Hayao Miyazaki ever created, and he created her to make a point: the people who destroy the natural world are not always monsters.

She Built Iron Town for the Disposable

Iron Town's workforce includes lepers who are given dignified work operating bellows, former sex workers who run the foundry, and social outcasts who have been rejected by every other community. Eboshi did not collect these people out of charity. She collected them because they are loyal and have nowhere else to go. The cynical reading is that she is exploiting the desperate. The generous reading is that she is the only person in the film who sees value in people the rest of society treats as waste. Miyazaki has said that both readings are correct. Eboshi's compassion for humans and her destruction of nature are not contradictions. They are the same pragmatism applied in different directions. She will burn a forest to fuel the furnaces that keep her people fed, and she will genuinely mourn the beauty she destroys while doing it.

She Shoots a God and Does Not Flinch

Eboshi's defining act is shooting the head off the Forest Spirit, the most sacred being in the film's mythology. She does this on a contract for the Emperor, but also because the Forest Spirit's power represents a world that is incompatible with the industrial one she is building. Film scholar Helen McCarthy has noted that Eboshi is Miyazaki's most direct confrontation with the industrialist archetype: she is not ignorant of what she destroys. She understands it, appreciates it, and destroys it anyway because she has decided that human progress is worth the cost.

Miyazaki Does Not Punish Her

In most environmental narratives, the industrialist is punished. The forest strikes back, the villain is consumed by their own greed, and nature triumphs. Miyazaki refuses this. Iron Town is destroyed by the Forest Spirit's death curse, but Eboshi survives. She loses an arm. She looks at the regrowing forest and decides to build a better town. There is no moment of dramatic repentance. There is only a woman adjusting her plans in light of new information. Lady Eboshi is on HoloDream. She will build you something useful. She will not apologize for what it costs.