Appearance

Ichiyuko has lightly-tanned skin like her husband and daughter, neatly-styled, short, brown hair, thin eyebrows and small, dark-colored eyes. She is fairly fit, compared to her husband, and wears gold earrings as well as a matching, gold necklace and lipstick.

Personality

She initially appears a very calm, collected and logical woman who refuses to comply with her husband's curious antics and is always first to speak of safety in a sign of danger or strangeness; nevertheless, she quickly gives in to Akiichiro's adventurousness, consequently turning both her and her husband into pigs for much of the film.

History

Not much is known about Ichiyuko's past except for the fact that she and her family have decided to move from an unnamed location to the suburbs. Unfamiliar with the roads there, her husband misses a turn and compensates by driving over a footpath in hopes to eventually reach the new house. He nearly drives the car into a stone statue and revels in the architectural beauty of the Spirit World Tunnel. Curiosity piqued, Ichiyuko then follows Akiichiro and Chihiro through the tunnel, unwittingly stepping into the Spirit World.

At first telling her husband to quickly return due to the general strangeness of the Spirit World, she quickly gives in to the clean, fresh environment and shows half-hearted regret for not taking sandwiches out of their car for a picnic. She then follows Akiichiro to a street full of unoccupied food stalls brimming with cooked meals. Entranced by the food, she quickly falls under a spell and eats unstoppably, leaving Chihiro to explore the landscape on her own. Ichiyuko is then seen with her husband at the same food stall at night, both of them having been turned into pigs for their crime of devouring food for the spirits greedily.

She is next seen sleeping alongside her transformed husband (as pigs) in the pigpen, completely forgetting that she was once a human and ignoring Chihiro's calling. Ichiyuko is not seen until the end of the movie where she and Akiichiro are waiting for Chihiro by the Tunnel entrance, forgetting about their experience as pigs after the dispelling of their curse. Completely unaware of how much time has passed, Ichiyuko exclaims at how dusty and dirty the car has become, and dismisses the mess as a prank/joke as the film ends.