Most of the Aryan themed works that I have examined here tended to focus on the militarist aspects of Aryanism. High adventure makes for exciting storytelling, however the extent of Aryanism (and heroism) is much farther and varied. A key aspect that I have not yet covered would be the concept of Original Nobility, which is defined as such:

Original Nobility

Belief that nobility is the initial condition of all sentience, lost over time in the world. Implies Arya as process of reversion rather than process of advance. Implies high opinion towards children and their perspectives.

The 1988 animated film My Neighbor Totoro shows this idea very well as two young sisters move into a countryside home with their father after their mother is hospitalized. The woods surrounding the home have some very interesting beings living in them and these particular entities can only be seen by children.

The film starts with Mei and Satsuki, along with their father who is driving, on the road in the countryside to a new home. This immediately ties into Aryanism as they are making their to what is clearly a farming community and they have come from a big city, which ends up making only one, very brief, appearance in the film. The young girls are filled with a genuine children’s enthusiasm as they wave and greet the people they pass. When they reach the house, the girls’ gusto doesn’t pause for a second as they explore each and every corner.

Discovering The Past

Things start to get interesting when they open the house bath. As the door opens and daylight streams in, a black mass of what initially appears to be vermin, scatters away into cracks in the wall and back to darkness. The girls are slightly hesitant about entering, but this feeling clears quickly and they begin to look for signs of the little creatures they had just seen. This is a key moment, as I have a feeling that most grown people (as I did) would react with disgust towards what they saw in the bath. It would be taken as a “bug problem” and an exterminator would be called to look the house over. This spawning of disgust is absent from girls’ dispositions towards this unexpected sight. When they go to open the windows upstairs, Mei goes so far as to try and capture one of the scurrying black puffs before it makes it into a crack in the wall. She succeeds and this scene has yet another important bit: the little dark puff is shown to have eyes and a reaction of fear as it sees that it is unable to make it with the rest of its crowd. By now it is certain that whatever these little creatures are, they are not “vermin.”

Downstairs, the girls meet “Granny,” no relation to their family, but the elderly lady will serve as their caretaker and says that Mei and Satsuki can call her that. This initial extension of warmness to people one has just met reflects the gestures of the girls as they waved to people in the countryside during their ride over. Granny also knows about the “soot gremlins” and explains that they live in uninhabited houses, but may peacefully move out if the new residents prove to be good people. She also says that only children can see these soot gremlins, and that she used to be able to see them when she was a child. In the woods near the house, there is a very large camphor tree which seems to have magical qualities. When Mei and Satsuki appear to be used to their new home, the soot gremlins drift in the wind and end up at the tree.

One gets the impression that these opening scenes focus very much on Mei and Satsuki. So much so that some viewers may be wondering where the “plot” is. Plot usually centers around a conflict or a problem, yet here, the most dramatic story element – a mother ailing in the hospital – is only in the background. The film is decidedly much more about discovering and exploring (especially the past, which ties in with Arya being a reversion) rather than dealing with problem or conflict. Nobility, as defined by Aryanism, is very much about preventing conflict and, more importantly, preventing the seeds that will lead to such confrontations from ever even sprouting. Thus, with their Original Nobility still strong, Mei and Satsuki don’t see and or even feel need for conflict in this story. In fact, they approach all of life with a great enthusiasm – both help Granny clean the house, there is even a great comedic shot of Satsuki dashing back and forth, in and out of frame, as she sponges the floor; Satsuki also makes lunch for everyone in the morning and is mindful about being in school on time; the younger Mei stays home and explores the woods; while father works, either at home or at a university in the city.

One morning Mei sees a peculiar creature in the garden and happily chases after it. Much like her and Satsuki’s reaction the soot sprites, she isn’t afraid or distrusting of it, there is no negative reaction on her part and there is no need for one in her young state.

Mei chases the little creatures down a hidden tunnel in the brush and to the base of a large tree, the giant camphor tree seen before. The shot when the sprites rush into a crack in the tree bears a strong visual resemblance to the black puffs scurrying into cracks in the house walls suggesting that Mei is now seeing a clearer (and more complex) version of the entities. This is then taken to the next level when she falls down the hole, after looking down it, and sees an even bigger version! This new creature virtually identical in composition to the others just much bigger. Mei names him “Totoro” – this is said to be a mispronunciation of the Japanese word for “troll” – however, given the theme of Original Nobility, there is another consideration for us to make. This is that it’s the word “troll” that is actually inaccurate, while Mei, with her unspoiled perspective, sees the magic beast more clearly and honestly than any modern language can.

Later, she tries to lead Father and Satsuki to Totoro, but now the hidden tunnel doesn’t seem to lead where it did before. The way has been lost for an unexplained reason… this apparently turns into a non-issue when they find the tree, but the hole in it is gone, much to Mei’s disappointment. Satsuki even laughs a little at Mei for being childish at this point. Father tries to calm her and says the “the keepers of the forest” are only seen when they want to be seen. This is, in a sense, accurate as the sprites Mei initially chased turned invisible in effort to hide, but even this didn’t allow them to escape the keenness of a child. Father’s explanation of “the keepers of the forest” is also interesting. He is an adult and long passed from his state of original nobility, but he still retains some memory of it, however it is only the young Mei who sees the spiritual energies of the tree in the clearest way. Satsuki is older and, at this point, has yet to see the sprites and Totoro.

She does in the next key scene as the girls wait for Father at a bus stop. Note that they decided to wait out here due to the rain and they brought an umbrella for him – a nice bit of selflessness. Father seems to be late as he is not on the first bus to come by. It is getting dark and late and Mei falls asleep on Satsuki’s back. It is then that Totoro appears. This is an interesting scene visually, as it is rainy and dark and the girls stand under one street light, effectively a small bright bubble in near total darkness, when Totoro makes his appearance by stepping into the lit part of the country road. The brightness is representative of Original Nobility as it can be seen in today’s world: a small field of light that will soon disappear, but from which profound insights can be spawned – the only true bit of Arya in today’s callous World. In this small field of light, the girls receive a small gift from Totoro – a little bag – before he rides away on a cat-shaped bus!

Re-Growth of Idealism

The bag contains little golden kernels, which the girls had seen laying around the garden before. The first sprites that Mei chased also had these in a little bag. They plant these seeds, which at first don’t grow. Father explains to them that it takes time, but the girls are not content. One night they see Totoro and the sprites dancing by where they planted the seeds, so they go out to them and get taken for a wild flying ride and back to the garden where the seeds grow into a group of trees including what appears to be another huge camphor tree. This ends up being only a dream, as the next morning the new trees are gone, however, there are young sprouts in the garden and it is suggested that the trees will eventually grow. Seed symbolism is very relevant to Aryanism and the golden seeds indicate the mythical golden age – gold has no monetary or materialist connotations to Aryans, but rather symbolizes fields of fertile crops basking in sunlight – in other words, under the Swastika. On a side note: a degraded version of this notion appears in the national anthem of the USA as “amber waves of grain” – amber is a precious stone and a symbol of vanity, thus connecting fertile crops to the idea of an exploitable resource. Aryanism is not confined to such base calculations.

Up to this point in the film, idealism was seen mainly on a symbolic and metaphorical level – sprites, Totoro, magic trees. However, with the sprouting of the kernels in the garden we begin to see that this idealism starts to crossover into girls’ real world. The inciting incident here is actually some bad news: Mother cannot make a scheduled weekend visit due to some complications in her treatment. This upsets Mei very much, while the older Satsuki tries to deal with the problem in a “mature” way. She even yells at Mei, “Grow up!” She seems to be abandoning ideals for empirical methods. On the other hand, Mei, though distressed she may be, decides to go on her own to the hospital with some of Granny’s garden vegetables in order to cure her mother. This is interesting as it carries on the seed symbolism as plants are essentially mature seeds and vegetables are cultivated plants – Aryan symbolism once again.

The aforementioned one appearance of the city is right before this sequence when Father learns that Mother will not becoming home for the weekend; he is in his university office at the time and hence, the big city is linked to depressing news, while the countryside is linked to idealism in the film. The hospital where Mother is staying is not quite in the big city, but also clearly not fully in the countryside, it’s in a small town, an intermediary region. Interestingly, in an earlier scene when Father and the girls went to visit Mother, a picture on the wall of a tree can be seen. This suggests that, like Father, she is still aware on some level of “the keepers of the forest” – she cannot see them as Mei and Satsuki can, but her Original Nobility is not fully lost.

While searching for Mei, Satsuki gets really distressed, but doesn’t give up; she literally runs and runs and runs, looking here there and everywhere she can. This drive of hers was seen earlier when they were cleaning the house and when she made lunch for everybody – she has a strong commitment to helping others – a sense of duty to family and community. After much searching her feet are dirty and this mirrors the scene where Mei had dirty hands after catching the soot sprite. Not surprisingly, in the very next scene Satsuki goes to the camphorwood and down the hole where she falls and lands on Totoro. Here the Cat-Bus is summoned and takes Satsuki to Mei and then takes them to see Mother at the hospital. They look, from a distance, through the window and see Father and Mother talking and learn that Mother was only kept in the ward due to a cold and will visit next weekend. The picture of the tree can be seen once again in this scene.

The Cat-Bus is an interesting character. Not only can it be seen by children, but also by animals, suggesting that mankind’s materialistic existence, to which animals are not as confined to, has blocked it from seeing true ideals. The Cat-Bus’s travel routes are also completely unconfined to roads and it makes its way through the countryside any which way it can; it can cut across and over predetermined and conventional boundaries to achieve its goal – something Aryanism must do to succeed.

The term “Aryan” is inexorably linked to the concept of “Aryan race” about which there are enormous misunderstandings, most of these are deliberately calculated and propagated by Zionists. The fact is that Aryans define their racial idealism as such:

Racial Idealism

Sense of belonging with a race according to relation to an abstract ideal that cuts across conventional categories.

Conventional categories being skin color, ethnicity, religion, etc…

It is with this symbolic idealism that Satsuki finds Mei. It also allows the girls to leave an ear of corn, one from Granny’s garden, on the hospital window sill where it is seen by the parents. Once again, the line between idealism and current reality is blurred with the two fields moving still closer together.

Other Matters

There is another child character in the film, Kanta, who doesn’t seem to notice Totoro and the other magical beings. This seems odd as he lives in the countryside, away from the pressures of the megalopolis Tokyo. However, this once again suggests cutting across conventional lines: a person doesn’t see or not see Totoro based on where they’re from, but from the sense of nobility they possess. Kanta doesn’t seem to have it, he doesn’t treat his work very seriously and he thinks that the house that Mei and Satsuki explore with such enthusiasm is actually “haunted.” Thus, Kanta is a Gentile and for all intents and purposes has been brainwashed beyond reversion. The closest thing he does to a truly good deed is offer his umbrella to Satsuki and Mei in one scene, but then immediately he nervously runs off. Just like he is scared of the house, he is scared of the people around him who possess noble traits. Many real World Gentiles are like this as they succumb to defensive tribalism, which has its epitome in Judaism.

Conclusion

Given what comes out of Hollywood these days, this is a very unique film. It is originally from Japan, but it did get a US release in 2005 with popular American actors supplying voice talent, however, it did not have a major theatrical run. Thus, as with virtually all other works that have similar themes, it was lost amidst the babble only to be seen and understood and appreciated by a few.