British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses

By Catherine Butler 

‎Bloomsbury Academic (2023)
ISBN-13: 978-1350195479

Review by Kimberley Reynolds

It has been a very long time since I admired and enjoyed an academic publication as much as I did Catherine Butler’s study of the long relationship between British children’s books and Japanese culture. The book is meticulously researched and draws on a wide range of academic disciplines, but it is so engagingly written that it will be as accessible to lay audiences as to specialists in the field. I have been fortunate in having worked with several Japanese scholars and students over the years and in visiting Japan several times, but I learned more from this book than I have done even from these rich experiences. Butler draws on literary, scientific, biographical, autobiographical, historical, political and many other sources to construct a framework through which we can understand the appeal of British writing for children to people in Japan.

Each of the five chapters introduces a new body of work and way of understanding the impact and reception of British children’s books in Japan. The Introduction is titled, ‘Writing from the outside in’, which I think captures the essence of this book: Catherine Butler may have begun her research as an interested outsider, but through close study of Japanese culture and language she has found a position at the intersection between British children’s books and Japan. While alert to what she can never fully know or fully understand and the way her thinking is inevitably shaped by earlier Western analyses of Japanese culture, she is nonetheless illuminating about the texts, institutions, films and places she discusses. The book is principally concerned with Japanese responses to British children’s books, but from her position between the two cultures, Butler frequently provides what she describes as a ‘looking-glass’ in which British readers will find attitudes to and assumptions about children and their books reflected in not always flattering ways. I was particularly struck by nineteenth-century accounts of Japan as a ‘Paradise’ for children and babies. The approach to raising children was so different from that in middle-class British homes that several commentators write about it with a kind of awed surprise. One example is the writer Mary Crawford Fraser, whose husband was an attaché there in the 1890s. In A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan: Letters from Home to Home (1898) she observes, ‘It is, to me, most comforting to see that all that is desirable in the little people’s deportment can be obtained without snubbings or punishments or weary scoldings. The Love showered upon children simply wraps them in warmth and peace, and seems to encourage every sweet good trait of character without ever fostering a bad one’ (p. 25).

That discussion of childhood forms part of the first chapter, where Butler illustrates the emergence of the relationship between Japan and Britian through the lens of children’s books. This is followed by a chapter that looks in more detail at the way a British presence in Japan – not least in the form of missionaries – helped bring about a body of writing for children of the kind that had evolved in the West. In other words, it resulted in the creation works by individual authors specifically for children’s edification and entertainment as opposed to traditional tales for a general audience including children. Butler discusses these books as part of the drive to modernise Japan. Many of the first children’s books were translations of Western classics including The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. Delightfully, the Japanese love of Beatrix Potter, I learned, came from the publication of Peter Rabbit in an agricultural journal!  I was very pleased to see that unlike so many scholars, Butler pays fulsome tribute to the translators who underpinned – as they still do – the process of introducing books from other countries.

Chapter Three takes us to the spine that supports the literary relationship between Britain and Japan by examining the creation of what Butler identifies as a Japanese canon of British children’s literature – a canon that diverges significantly from the one that prevails in the UK. Japan, in fact, has preserved many texts that are now completely forgotten in their country of origin. This point is well exemplified by the case of Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders (1872). As well as looking at well-loved British texts such as Tom’s Midnight Garden, The Children of Green Knowe and Charlotte Sometimes, this chapter introduces Japanese books that were inspired by such classics as Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. At this point Butler moves beyond traditional printed texts to discuss adaptations and repurposings of British works in the form of anime, manga, TV, music and advertising. Logically, then, Chapter Four is a detailed case study of Miyazaki Hayao and British children’s literature, culminating in extended readings of some of Studio Ghibli’s brilliant animated adaptations of British children’s books.

Chapters Four and Five, which covers children’s literature tourism in Britain and as the inspiration for popular children’s book-based theme parks across Japan, are probably the two that will be of most interest to general readers.  Not all the theme parks are exclusively dedicated to British landscapes or books, but Butler’s careful discussions of these elements once again make us reflect on the respect and emotion garnered by these works abroad. (Children’s books, I believe, are a too little recognised form of soft power.) Butler’s photographs of these locations illustrate the chapter. She has also provided images for other chapters and the book is quite generously illustrated throughout. The quality of the reproductions is my only serious criticism of this fine volume, which concludes with a brief but thoughtful reflection on what the use of British children’s books in Japan might signify. In their Japanese contexts, the reworkings of British books are affectionate, knowledgeable and deeply respectful, and yet they change the books for those British who encounter them. Similarly, Japanese tourism in Britain has changed the places they visit, as sites ‘cater to Japanese fantasies of Britain…shaped in no small part by children’s literature’ (p. 180). This relationship is long, enduring, valuable and fascinating, as British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture makes beautifully clear.