For you, anon:

The spa in Sen to Chihiro is decorated by red lanterns, and the interior is color-coordinated in glittering gold and red: there’s no doubt this is the super-bad-taste style of a Japanese soapland. Many female workers scrub and massage bodies of the customers (they are all monsters). In this movie, the spa workers are called “Yuna” in Japanese. If you happened to have a Japanese dictionary, please refer the word. Iwanami Dictionary of Japanese defines “Yuna” as “a female spa worker who provides massage, and sex”.   And Haku tells Chihiro that the only way to survive there and get back her parents is to work there like the other girls. So the owner, Yubaba (Spa Grandma) interviews Chihiro. The stingy old lady, whose head looks four feet in diameter, is the analogue of Alice’s Queen of Hearts, but she dresses like a madam from 19th-century brothel. She hires Chihiro and gives her a fake name “Sen” like a stripper being given new name, like Amber.

A ten-year-old girl forced to work in a Turkish bath? Is that the story that Miyazaki really wants to tell ten-year-old girls?

Yes. In his interview for the Japanese edition of PREMIERE magazine, Miyazaki explained that his wonderland is not just a fantasy, but represents the real world of today’s Japan. “The sex industry is everywhere now in Japan,” he said. “And the number of young girls who look like whores is growing.”

In this interview, Miyazaki worries about the circumstance surrounds today’s Japanese girls. Girls who grow up in Japan have to live surrounded by obscenity which is spread by media, no matter how much their parents try to cover their eyes. Furthermore, with the Japanese economy having gone downhill for more than a decade now, the unemployment rate is as high as it’s ever been for women, getting a decent job is extremely difficult, because of these reasons compounded by sex discrimination. Japanese girls have got to have the guts to do anything even if it’s work at a place like Super Loose. They’re paying the price of the indulgences of their parents’ generation: in the eighties, Chihiro’s mom and dad enjoyed the bubble economy’s hedonism without conscience like pigs.

Though Chihiro of course never actually provides sexual services in the film, it’s obvious to me from the many details I’ve pointed out and the director’s confession that Spirited Away is a film about prostitution. Oddly, no critics have pointed this out. Parents take their kids to the theater and look like they don’t care. Maybe most of them just think it’s a fairy tale. And maybe some people who do notice are just holding their tongues.