Column Anime Spotlight A Spider’s Unsung Industry: Appreciating Kamaji of Spirited Away Hats off to the hardest working spider-person in all of anime! By Leah Thomas | Published on September 4, 2025 Credit: Studio Ghibli Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Studio Ghibli I just started a new job in Tokyo. On day one, I had the not altogether uncommon experience of encountering a devout arachnophobe. I say “devout” because this person, like quite a few others I’ve met, brought up her hatred for spiders unprompted. “If I see one, I will kill it immediately.” If a penchant for arachno-cide is an unfair measure of human compassion, then go ahead and call me biased: I immediately question the character of anyone who squishes a spider. For spider-killers, I reserve the same targeted disdain I also direct at people who brag about using ChatGPT, scalp Pokemon cards, or take off their shoes and socks on airplanes.  Is this fair? Probably not. I know there are primal reasons why so many people loathe spiders. According to Vanessa LoBue, Ph.D., writing for Psychology Today, some research supports the idea that human beings’ fear of spiders is a holdover from prehistoric times, when spiders and snakes were among our most dangerous predators. “Research from my own lab at Rutgers has shown that adults, children, and even babies are really fast to detect the presence of a snake or spider in a series of photographs—faster than we are to detect other objects, like flowers and frogs.” Maybe there’s some merit to that, but she also goes on to say that babies love animals, and, in studies like this one here, play among snakes quite happily. But regardless of whether the fear is learned or not, the act of killing a spider is a choice. My mother, a passionate gardener, revered spiders almost as much as she feared them. She knew they were the ideal predators to place among her daylilies, skillful slayers of mites and aphids and mosquitoes to boot. Though she shrieked and hopped on chairs like a character out of an old cartoon whenever she spotted them, she instructed us kids to “take them outside,” rather than kill them.  As a child I was pretty fond of spiders, maybe because I was and am a Halloween enthusiast, or because like most Michiganders I used to climb trees and encounter them there, or because I read and watched Charlotte’s Web and wept for her, or because there always used to be a spider or two hanging out above our showerhead when I was a kid, like a bonus pet. That affection has not gone away. People learn this, and then it falls to me to capture the office critters that inevitably slip in and get cozy in Japanese workplaces.  I take a certain pride in the act of spider rescue missions, in slapping a paper cup down over one and pushing a notecard between the cup and the flooring and spiriting her away outside. It’s even better when the cup is clear plastic, so I can show her off to shuddering coworkers or delighted students along the way. After, I am careful to roll-step out the door so she doesn’t get too jostled and then find a nice leaf to place her on. I don’t know if they actually care, and sometimes their silk clings to the cup, and they rappel down instead. Sometimes I apologize to them. “Sorry, but you have to stay out here.” In my own home, this is certainly true, as I harbor a furry feline beast who thinks spiders might be fancy kibble. Sometimes a spider does surprise me, or jump out at me, and my heart stutters. And of course I’m not especially pleased when I walk right through a giant, unseen web on a trail or in my own apartment stairwell. But even as I’m cussing and pulling gunk from my hair and face, I find myself admiring the industry.  What? Overnight, little spider, you wove a web from the apartment railing to the door? A distance 100 times your length in a matter of mere hours? I’m a writer with obsessive hyperfocus tendencies: like many authors, I have spent entire weekends awake in front of a keyboard, sleeping hardly at all. But have I ever possessed one ounce of a spider’s sheer perseverance?  Itsy-Bitsy Chihiro Credit: Studio Ghibli Look, maybe I get a bit romantic about these little creatures, but I am far from the first to do so. In many cultures, spiders are symbols of good fortune. According to Swedish superstition, killing a spider will summon a rainstorm. In the UK, finding a money spider in your hair is not a disaster but an omen that money is coming your way. And yes, here in Japan, spiders are, much like worker bees, symbols of diligence and luck. This idea has made its mark on animation, as well, and I doubt any spider in Japan is quite as beloved as the mustachioed spider-man (no, not that one, but a man who is a spider) from Spirited Away. At my last job, one of my coworkers, juggling too many plates and saucers and cups and glasses and frying pans and whatever other metaphorical teaching commitments said, “I wish I were Kamaji! I need eight arms!” I laughed, because I also love and admire Kamaji, and despite his rather small role in a very beloved, fantastical story, he’s pretty unforgettable. Like many characters in Miyazaki’s works, Kamaji has an uncanny verisimilitude to him, like he’s someone you met once when you were a child. He has grandfather energy in the best way.  If anyone needs reminding—or has somehow lived a life without enjoying the undisputed masterpiece that is Spirited Away—Kamaji, a many-limbed yokai, is among the first to show the protagonist, Chihiro, begrudging kindness when she wanders into the spirit world. After she crosses the bridge to the bathhouse, assisted by a mysterious boy named Haku, who tells her to ask for Kamaji, she clambers trepidatiously down a treacherous staircase that clings to the walls beneath the bathhouse and tiptoes into the yokai’s domain: the boiler room. Kamaji is clearly too busy working to worry about a little mortal girl, his long grey arms working the bellows and the mortar and reaching into drawers for herbs and pulling bathwater request tokens from hooks that descend from the towering onsen above. Chihiro asks for a job, and he tells her he has all the workers he needs in the form of magicked little creatures made of soot. He commands his soot sprites to shift heavy coal into the furnace, and continues pulling levers and sipping straight from a teapot without stopping.  Credit: Studio Ghibli Chihiro, almost as stubborn as Kamaji and far more desperate, tries to work anyway, hauling one heavy block of coal towards the fire. When she almost gives up, he calls out to her with some gruff encouragement: “Finish what you started!” When she does exactly that, he softens, and thereafter, he is an unwavering ally of the little human girl, causing trouble in the spirit onsen. Is it only because he respects her dedication, or is it something more? Is he representative of notoriously brutal Japanese work ethic, or perhaps of Miyazaki himself? What, exactly, has led this mysterious old spider to work so arduously in such miserable conditions, trapped working in a dark, hot room while those above him enjoy their ghostly spa days? Well, of course, there is no official answer to these questions. But in admiring Kamaji, I looked into what inspired his creation, and stumbled into yet another fascinating saga of Japanese history and folklore. Those Who Hide in the Ground Kamaji is based on a yokai known colloquially as tsuchigumo. Tsuchi means “soil” or “earth,” and kumo (gumo) means “spider.” Tsuchigumo is not the only spider-inspired yokai, or even the most popularly depicted. That distinction falls to Jorōgumo, an enormous spider that transforms into a beautiful woman in order to lure men to their deaths.  Kamaji’s tsuchigumo has another origin. Language evolves in Japan as it does everywhere, and “tsuchigumo” has come a long way from where it started, thanks in part to how handily Japanese lends itself to wordplay. Tsuchigumo is probably a play on “tuchi go mori,” which means “those who hide in the ground.” This was a derogatory term used to describe rebellious Japanese clans as far back as 1500 years ago. Some of these clanspeople, also known as kuzu, are believed to have lived in the cavern systems in Nara, back when the capital was called Asuka. These clans resisted the rule of the Yamato empire, digging their heels in to defy both imperialism and the arrival of Buddhism. While historically, the Asuka period is known as something of a Japanese renaissance, ushering in new art, architecture, and literacy, for those clans who wished to retain Shintoism and traditional ways of living, it must have been a daunting time. Over the course of less than two hundred years, Japan changed not only its name and primary religion, but also shifted from a diverse collection of divergent clans to an empire.  And any ruler knows, when a minority is giving you trouble, the best retaliation is dehumanization: Spread descriptions of the shamanic people who defy your rule as dirt-scrabblers, as grubby monsters with long arms, as stubborn and bestial in their nature and bearing, and then let hyperbolic whispers and rumors do the rest. While tsuchigumo wasn’t a documented yokai until many centuries after these clans had been routed out and eliminated, the term’s continued use and adaptation is a testament to the notoriety of the word. Tsuchigumo grew, morphing from an insult aimed at a despised minority to the name of many-legged creatures who, according to the earliest stories, devour thousands of people and stash their victims’ skulls in their abdomens.  In a sense, however negative the connotations, the kuzu legacy lives on, contorted by this new definition. It is always hard to say how much of Miyazaki’s symbolism is deliberate and how much is incidental to his art, but in this case, even the name of Kamaji’s inspirational “species” proves remarkably tenacious.  The Spider’s Tenacity Credit: Studio Ghibli Monstrous spiders have not lost their hold over the imagination of Japanese artists. In Dororo, Tezuka wrote of a vicious spider demon masquerading as a beautiful village chief. Rui, a formidable antagonist in Demon Slayer, is a demonic spider. Every monster-girl fetish anime boasts a sexy spider lady. In general, these characters are cunning, duplicitous, and selfish. But another anime, the isekai So I’m a Spider, So What? adopts a less disparaging approach to incorporating an arachnid character. When a classroom full of students die in an explosion and they wake up reincarnated in another world, one girl finds herself trapped in the body of a spider. The author of this fairly popular story, Okina Baba, is a self-described hikkikimori, and certainly knows how it feels to be trapped in the shadows. Is it surprising that the story of a spider making the best of her circumstances would be one Baba would want to write and explore? Like the kuzu in their caverns, people trapped in darkness do not give up on living, persisting however best they can. Kamaji is the quintessential embodiment of so many of these abstract ideas. He works, if not tirelessly, but without apparent resentment or payment; for a creature like Kamaji, the option of not working does not occur. He has all those arms and the ability to use them, and whatever circumstance brought him to a life of glowing goals and hard labor, he does not falter in his work. A spider’s work is her gift and curse; she rebuilds the web because that is all she knows, but she never does it poorly. Is Kamaji’s labor wasted because he does not enjoy the spoils of it? Does Miyazaki, after toiling tirelessly on yet another film that postpones his endless promises of retirement, seem happy about his work? Notoriously, no. No, the famed curmudgeon does not generally appear happy about most things, even though he brings humanity so much joy. Spiders are ingenious, creative creatures. But they are also sinister and duplicitous. According to Japanese superstition, seeing a spider in the morning means you will welcome a guest, but seeing a spider at night means a thief will visit you. To appreciate spiders is to appreciate duality, or contradiction.  The spirit world that Chihiro enters operates by a fundamental rule: in order to survive and retain her humanity, she must work. If she does not, she, like her parents before her, will become livestock. While being forced to work may make these characters—and the rest of us out here in the real world as well—occasionally feel a bit like livestock, but work that you find meaningful can also allow for a sense of purpose. I am so far from wishing a life of labor on anyone in the world, and I am as anti-capitalist as they come. But I have found that in those moments when I do my job well and others benefit from it—be it a student or a reader or any stranger—I am grateful to be alive, and grateful to have made something.  Credit: Studio Ghibli And those who work the hardest are often the most appreciative of the moments when the work stops. Chihiro sits on a balcony with a friend, enjoying a meat bun after a successful day working the baths, looking out at a train that crosses a spectral sea. Kamaji, more than once, is seen slumbering under a quilt, the levers still before him, there before the boiler. A life of hard work is not easy or fair, but it is not without its merits. And a spider never questions that, because it is a spider. It makes and remakes and makes again. Miyazaki, time and again, writes stories that illustrate this human conflict. He crafts movies that champion humanity’s ingenuity and work ethic, but warn against the dangers of a life overwhelmed by work, centered on laboring rather than living. In The Wind Rises, engineer Jiro Horikoshi, inspired by a real person, is admirable because he doggedly pursues a goal, but also worthy of criticism because the planes he works so hard to design are tools of war. In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi works incredibly hard to support her people, mining iron ore at the expense of nature, ruthlessly damaging an ancient, sacred forest. Kamaji works far too hard for his own good, and for what? To offer baths and relaxation to countless fortunate spirits, people he will never meet? We learn he has held onto train tickets to elsewhere for more than forty years, but he does not hesitate to give them to Chihiro. At any time, he might have left the bathhouse behind; he could have escaped the darkness of the boiler room, the thankless hours and poor compensation, but he did not. Perhaps he valued having a purpose and dedicating himself to it, or perhaps there are other reasons—we don’t find out much about his past, and his secrets and motivations remain his own. But even Kamaji pauses his routine in order to lay his blanket over a sleeping child.  Credit: Studio Ghibli Anthropomorphizing spiders is a little silly, I know. Spiders are not considering existential nonsense when they build their webs. But maybe, instead, spiderifying people is a valid experiment, if only because it reminds us that it is all too easy to fall into a working life that resigns us to living in darkness, hidden from the sun and isolated from the people who are helped by or otherwise benefit from our labor. That is not a life to be ashamed of, but nor is there anything wrong with taking those tickets to elsewhere. Wherever spiders go, webs are made: wherever people go, a life is made. No matter what, life is likely to be a mostly unbroken procession of some kind of work or another.  Recently, I got on the train to elsewhere. I left behind a safe, beloved city to pursue the unknown, and I don’t know yet whether it was a great or terrible decision. But I am comforted by the thought that I brought my arms and mind and motivation with me, the tools for rebuilding webs. So many of us die without achieving our goals, but hell, sometimes working towards them is its own achievement. We keep at it, in our caverns or schools or boiler rooms or offices or bedrooms. The result is a life that is, if not well-lived, is never wasted.[end-mark] The post A Spider’s Unsung Industry: Appreciating Kamaji of <i>Spirited Away</i> appeared first on Reactor.