Guardian Cross
Nothing unexpected. The sex industry is pretty much all over Japan like infested rats with increasingly young kids doing it for the money and has been a nice neon red sign in the background for a long while.
But while I agree that prostitution may have been involved in the coming about of Spirited Away I do not agree that Spirited Away is a story about prostitution. The theme of the environment that Sen is in and the background story does seem to have certain influences, and perhaps the way Sen is thrown into work to save her parents and stripped of her identity to be anonymous, just another girl working in a bathhouse with uncaring supervisors and all that jazz, to me it reflects 'prostitution' without the prostitution in it. The story still stands on its own about a little girl with her parents taken away because of a 'debt' and working in an unknown place all alone with mythical-fantasy spirits and monsters following her every step, and while its all pretty and dreamy and all that the influences provide a darker undercurrent to the show that lends it a more realistic allure.
So its sort of like, while prostitution is prominent and blaring red signs in a culture and a country, its simply a backdrop and not all and everything of it, just like Sen is part of something else coming into contact with a background that has prostitution as one of its influences but whereby it is not centerstage and she does not come into contact with it, and nor does the bathhouse that she works in itself. Well, in the same way you won't say a schoolgirl in Japan is necessarily a prostitute that works for the industry when she's not in school even though we know a lot of them do.
Hope you understand what I'm trying to put across.
What you say sounds more likely to me. You can have something set somewhere and not have it be about that. Like how Ghost Hound is set in a brewery, but it's not about that.
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