Japan Up Close Essay Series

Telling the history of British children’s books in Japan was one thing, but I also wanted to understand the emotional and imaginative significance of British children’s books for Japanese readers. Stories set in  Britain, an exotic and distant country, could not “mean” the same thing to them as they did to the British for whom their settings reflected everyday life and a familiar environment. As one way to explore this imaginative difference, I investigated the role of children’s books in Japanese tourism, both in Britain and in Japan itself.

In Britain, dedicated Japanese visitors sometimes make “pilgrimages” to literary sites: Beatrix Potter’s home in the Lake District, the Pooh Sticks bridge in the Ashdown Forest, Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station. These fan activities are interesting, but I was still more fascinated by the way that Japanese experience could be shaped by places with less specific associations. The landscape of the Cotswolds, for example, is not the setting of any British children’s book well known in Japan. Its stone cottages, narrow lanes and rustic kitchen gardens do not resemble any Japanese landscape; yet for many Japanese visitors the area evokes a calming sense of familiarity, born of early childhood exposure to picture books and other stories. It is no surprise that many of the Japanese tourists to whom I talked compared visiting that landscape with the experience of “entering a picture book.”

In Japan, numerous educational and tourist facilities have been established to create a similar experience. The educational “village” of British Hills in Fukushima Prefecture (“the Britain that anyone can visit without a passport”); GB Victorian Village (formerly Dreamton) in Kyoto Prefecture; Yufuin Floral Village in Kyushu’s Oita Prefecture; and Lockheart Castle in Gunma Prefecture, are among the facilities that attempt (with varying degrees of verisimilitude) to create an immersive sense of being in Britain – often making explicit use of children’s books in order to do so.

In such places, Britain functions primarily as a fantasy location. Even where care has been taken to accurately reproduce architecture, cuisine and so on, the version of Britain on display is notably selective: it is old-fashioned rather than contemporary, rural rather than urban, and deeply culturally conservative. To that extent, of course, it mirrors the selectivity of many Western representations of Japan itself.

Writing British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture deepened my understanding of the selective way in which cultures perceive and reproduce each other, and the complexity of their motives for doing so, which go well beyond (though they can certainly include) such broad-brush terms as “cultural appropriation.” Whether it be the Japanese Village that opened in 1885 in Knightsbridge and entertained Victorian Londoners with tea houses, sumo displays, a Shinto shrine and a backdrop of Mount Fuji; or today’s Hyper Japan with its maid cafés and anime merchandise, Japan has always been seen through the filter of Western fantasies and desires; but the same is no less true of Japanese views of Britain.