The bathhouse economy runs on a single principle: strip away the name, and you strip away the capacity to leave.
Chihiro becomes Sen, Haku becomes a number in Yubaba's ledger—and this isn't metaphorical.
The film treats the name-theft as a literal transaction. Yubaba writes a contract, Chihiro's autonomy vanishes, and she moves through the world as a unit of labor with no claim to her own continuity.
The bathhouse's currency is neither gold nor paper. It's the ability to remember yourself. Yubaba hoards names the way a venture capitalist hoards equity—they're not meant to be earned back, only rented under her terms.
This literalizes what Japan feared in the late 1990s: that economic integration would convert citizens into interchangeable labor units. Today we've outsourced this to algorithms—credit scores, engagement metrics, data profiles are modern names-in-a-ledger—and you are reduced to a set of standardized values, tradeable across platforms, that determine what you can access. Spirited Away didn't predict this.
Watch the contract scene (timestamp 27:45-31:20) with your attention on Chihiro's face during the moment she signs—Miyazaki holds the shot long enough for you to see the exact frame where she stops resisting and accepts the logic of the exchange.
Miyazaki's 2008 essay on the film's production in *Starting Point* connects the bathhouse design directly to his observations of Tokyo's Bubble Era collapse and corporate restructuring, explicitly framing Yubaba as a portrait of how institutions absorb individual identity.