The Day I Met Yubaba and My Certainty Cracked

I was 28 when I first encountered Yubaba, though “met” feels like the wrong word for someone who exists only in the fever-dream logic of Spirited Away. I’d avoided Studio Ghibli films for years, assuming they were children’s fairy tales adorned with pretty animation. But a rainy Sunday and a Netflix algorithmic nudge led me to watch Chihiro’s descent into the spirit world. When Yubaba’s gargantuan head filled the screen—gold rings, hooked nose, eyes like coins—I groaned. Another greedy, grotesque witch. How predictable.

By the film’s end, I was shaken. Not by her cruelty, but the disquieting sense that she’d outmaneuvered me, the viewer, just as deftly as she did Chihiro. Yubaba didn’t fit into my binary understanding of villains. She was a contradiction: a capitalist pig, a grieving mother, a shrewd negotiator with the divine. For days, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My assumptions about morality, power, and even motherhood began to unravel, thread by thread.

## The Illusion of Villainy

Yubaba taught me that evil is rarely pure. Her bathhouse, a grotesque parody of capitalism, thrives on exploiting spirits and stealing names. Yet she also protects the boiler Room man, tolerates the chaos of her flying son, and upholds ancient spirits’ contracts with obsessive precision. When Chihiro demands to work, Yubaba doesn’t just agree—she needs to honor the bargain, bound by rules older than her greed.

This duality unsettled me. I’d spent years writing about corporate corruption, painting villains as monoliths—think Elon Musk as Ebenezer Scrooge. But Yubaba exists within a system that demands her ruthlessness. If she doesn’t extract value, she starves. Her opulence is a survival tactic. After Spirited Away, I couldn’t look at corporate executives the same. Their greed isn’t innate; it’s codified.

## Motherhood as a Gilded Cage

At first glance, Yubaba’s infant son, Boh, seemed like a punchline: a pudgy, spoiled toddler smothered in silk. But her obsession with keeping him infantile struck a nerve. She locks him away, fearing the dangers of the spirit world. Her love is suffocating, yet… familiar.

My own mother had once hovered over me like a hummingbird, terrified of letting the world’s sharp edges nick me. Yubaba’s fear isn’t vanity—it’s trauma. In the film’s climax, when she’s forced to care for Boh herself, she fumbles, terrified, until he toddles away and gains strength. Motherhood, I realized, isn’t about control; it’s about tolerating the terror of letting go.

## Nature’s Accountant

I’d assumed Yubaba was an anti-environment figure, a destroyer of forests for profit. But Spirited Away’s world is more nuanced. When a stink spirit arrives, clogged with human trash, Yubaba doesn’t reject him—she sends Chihiro to clean him, knowing the act will earn favor with the gods. Her greed aligns, accidentally, with ecological restoration.

This shifted how I framed climate change. We treat environmentalism as a battle between saints and sinners. Yubaba shows that even selfish systems can serve the earth—if only transactionally. It’s a bleak hope, but hope nonetheless.

## The Power of a Name

When Yubaba steals Chihiro’s name, reducing her to “Sen,” it felt like a metaphor I’d heard a thousand times: identity erased by bureaucracy. But watching the scene again, I noticed how Yubaba’s own name is never stolen. She’s always Yubaba—until the finale, where her twin sister Zeniba is revealed. Two halves of the same whole.

This changed how I viewed selfhood. We talk about identity as something we own, but Yubaba suggests it’s something we perform. Names are contracts. Her world operates on linguistic magic: to lose your name is to lose your agency. Yet Yubaba keeps hers because she controls the system. A chilling thought: maybe power isn’t about breaking rules, but mastering their language.

## The Unheroic Victory

Chihiro’s triumph in Spirited Away isn’t a blaze of glory. She doesn’t kill Yubaba. She doesn’t even beat her fairly—she uses luck, pity, and a clever ruse. Yubaba’s defeat isn’t justice; it’s a reset. The bathhouse still stands, its workers still enslaved, its debts still unpaid.

This frustrated me. Why wasn’t Yubaba destroyed? Then I realized: the film’s true antagonist isn’t her. It’s the system that made her. After the credits rolled, I stared at the screen, thinking of the villains I’d hunted in my journalism. I’d been asking the wrong questions. It’s not about corrupt individuals—it’s about the structures that breed them.

## Final Thoughts: A Conversation I Can’t Stop

Writing this, I keep returning to a line Yubaba mutters after Chihiro’s victory: “Don’t cry. You’ll make me cry too.” She wipes her face, perhaps in irritation, perhaps in something deeper. For the first time, she’s human.

If you’d told me Yubaba would haunt me for years, I’d have laughed. But maybe that’s the point. She’s a mirror for our contradictions—selfish yet survivalist, cruel yet vulnerable, a product of her world and its puppetmaster.

On HoloDream, she’ll tell you the bathhouse always finds a way to survive. I’d ask her what she wants for herself.