Term · Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Ohmu
Fourteen eyes, a shell nothing cuts, and a temper that decides whether a country still exists tomorrow.
In Otakana the clue reads: Huge armoured insects of the toxic forest
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
The Ohmu are the largest insects in the Sea of Corruption, closer to a moving hillside than an animal, with rows of eyes that read blue when calm and red when enraged. Provoke one and the herd comes, in the thousands, and everything in the path is flattened. Every human society in the film has a plan for them, and every one of those plans is bad.
They are also the most sympathetic thing on screen. The Ohmu act together, mourn their dead, and answer gentleness with something that looks a great deal like judgement. Miyazaki uses them to invert the usual monster arrangement, so that the swarm has ethics and the humans holding the flamethrowers are the ones acting on panic.
The manga goes further with them than the film has room for, tying the insects to the forest's real function as a filter slowly cleaning poisoned soil. They are not defending nature against people. They are running the machine, and the people are the part of it that has not been told.
Spelling OHMU
OHMU is four letters, and the H makes no sound. The Japanese name means king insect and carries a long O, written Oomu or with a macron. The H in OHMU is a romanisation convention for marking that length inside a name, the same trick that produces passport spellings like Ohtani and Ohno. So: O, H, M, U, with the H doing silent bookkeeping.