Character · Princess Mononoke
Lady Eboshi
She employs the people nobody else will touch, and she is killing the forest in order to keep doing it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Lady who runs the ironworks town
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Princess Mononoke
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Lady Eboshi runs Irontown, a fortified smelting works built on a mountain the gods have not finished holding. She bought women out of brothels and put them on the bellows. She takes in lepers, feeds them properly, and has them build guns. Her workers adore her and she has earned every bit of it. She is also felling the forest for charcoal and shooting whatever comes out of it.
Miyazaki's refusal to make her a villain is a large part of why the film is still argued about. Eboshi is neither greedy nor cruel. She has a coherent plan for human dignity that happens to require the mountain stripped bare, and the film gives her the argument instead of a cackle. When she announces that she will kill the forest spirit, she means it as public works.
The lepers are not decoration. Miyazaki visited a sanatorium for Hansen's disease patients while making the film, and the bandaged gunsmiths came out of that visit. It changes the register of the entire town: the people Eboshi rescued are the ones building the weapon that damns her. Yuko Tanaka voices her in Japanese, Minnie Driver in the English dub.
Spelling EBOSHI
EBOSHI is six letters, e-bo-shi, and the word is a real one. An eboshi is the tall black lacquered cap worn by court nobles and samurai, so her name is a hat. The SH is a single Japanese sound. No long vowels, nothing dropped, three even syllables, and the game wants EBOSHI without the Lady sitting in front of it.