Hasegawa's Fairy Tales: Toying with Japan

The President and Fellows of Harvard College Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Hasegawa's Fairy Tales: Toying with Japan Author(s): Christine M. E. Guth Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 53/54 (Spring - Autumn, 2008), pp. 266-281 Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25608821 . Accessed: 20/11/2014 04:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The President and Fellows of Harvard College and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 266 RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 Figure 1. Kobayashi Eitaku, the sparrow's dance fromThe Tongue-Cut Sparrow. Creped book 6x4 in., 1885. Author's collection. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Hasegawa's fairy tales Toyingwith Japan CHRISTINE M. E. GUTH This article takes Hasegawa's Japanese Fairy Tale Series as a point of departure for examining some of the Euro-American social, political, and cultural agendas the figure of the child was made to serve in the context of Japan.1 Copyrighted inTokyo in 1885 and in print until 1936, these illustrated retellings of vernacular stories, more commonly classified today as legend, folklore, or myth, foreground the problematic nature of theWestern image of Japan as "childish," with negative connotations of behavioral immaturity,or "childlike," with positive connotations of natural moral innocence.2 A dominant of cross-cultural discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this construct of the child, early often gendered female, is an example of what the mode anthropologist Johannes Fabian has called "temporal displacement," a mode of thought inwhich spatially distant yet contemporary peoples are seen as historically distant.3 In this developmental scheme, Western civilization ispositioned at the top of an evolutionary ladder with other non-Western nations at various stages beneath it.Thus considered, Japan is the childhood of theWest. Iwould like to thank the anonymous readers who commented on earlier versions of this I am also grateful to the intellectual essay generosity of Cyhthea Bogel, Ellen Conant, and Allen Hockley. This article is dedicated to the memory of Jay Fliegelman. 1. For basic data on Hasegawa's and their distribution publications to Frederic A. Sharf, Takeshiro Hasegawa: Meiji Japan's Publisher ofWoodblock-Illustrated Books Crepe-Paper indebted Preeminent (Salem, Mass.: 1994). Peabody Essex Museum, 2. Rare exceptions are the studies by Ann King Herring, "Early Translations of Japanese Fairy Tales and Children's Literature," Phaedrus: International Annual for the History of Children's and Youth's Literature (1988): 97-112, and Ann Herring, The Dawn ofWisdom: from the Japanese Collection Selections of the Cotsen Children's Press, 2000). Library (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional 3. Johannes Fabian, Time and Other: How Anthropology (New York: Columbia Object University Press, 1983). Makes Britain and America, Hasegawa's small fairy tale books illuminate thisWestern need for retreat and self realization. This imaginative identification has significant cultural implications for Japan, challenging the view that the figurative force of the child serves solely as an instrumentof domination. Italso prompts us to ask whether the quest for cultural authenticity is not a way of talking about the return to a personal psychological or repressed past. Hasegawa : Takejir World publisher Hasegawa Takejiro (1853-1936) made his debut as a publisher of fairy tales with English, German, and French translations of five popular Japanese stories: Momotard, or the Little Peachling; The Tongue-Cut Sparrow; The Monkey and theCrab; TheOld Man Who Made the Dead This representation rationalized racial inequality through the potential of differential physical and mental evolution. By the same token, italso transformed Japan into a place where historical, cultural, and personal pasts lost to themodern West could be retrieved through the adult performance of childhood by offering regressive pleasures of innocent sensuality on the one hand, and I am free-floating nostalgia on the other. Appearing at a particularly intense moment in the aestheticization and fetishization of childhood inVictorian and Edwardian Its Trees Blossom; and Kachi-kachi Mountain. These appeared under the imprintof Kobunsha, "The Society for the Propagation of Knowledge," initially intended as instructional materials for Japanese students ofWestern languages. Books were identified by title in both Japanese and the chosen foreign language, printed in largewell-spaced type read from leftto right, and accompanied illustrations. by woodblock-printed Production and distribution of the Japanese Fairy Tale Series combined traditional and new technologies of reproduction. While the textwas printed inmoveable metal type, the color illustrationswere produced using woodblocks firstEnglish-language (fig. 1). Hasegawa's fairy tale series, the focus of this study, included twenty five titles, each ranging from eighteen to thirty-two pages in length, publishedseriallybetween 1885 and 1903.4 Each printing comprised 4. I consulted five hundred to one books in the Cotsen Children's Library of Princeton the Griffis collection at Rutgers Library; and Stanford Publication dates are hard to University's rare book collection. determine since Hasegawa reprinted the books many times without so I have not changing the frontmatter. The books also lack pagination, included page numbers when citing passages. University; This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 268 RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 thousand copies, with the most successful titles reissued many times during the fiftyyears between 1885 and the publisher's death in 1936. great innovation was to make his books Hasegawa's available on creped paper, using a mechanical process that gave the smooth surface of the paper the softness and rippled effect of crinkly silk, chirimen, a popular fabric for female clothing in Japan and theWest. Woodblock prints had been issued on creped paper since the 1830s, but books with a fabric-like texture became especially popular in theMeiji era (1867-1912), when adapting the technique or effect associated with one medium for use in another was admired for itstechnical virtuosity. The Meiji era creping process involved pressing the paper intogrooved molds after the were complete, reducing each printing and illustrations book fromroughly5 by 7V4to4 by 6 inches,a size akin to the genre of British children's publications known as "toy books."5 This feature, which paradoxically gave the books the illusion of fragility, in factmade them more durable and resistant towear and tear. By this canny created easily portable, marketing strategy,Hasegawa exotic artifacts for audiences of all ages. A Christian convert who was proficient in English, tastes and Hasegawa was well-attuned toWestern his international he when publishing began requirements venture. His collaborators were David Thompson (1835-?), a Presbyterian missionary and teacher, Kate James (dates unknown), who provided thirteen stories, and her friend Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935), a scholar of Japanese literature,who produced seven. in arranging Chamberlain also assisted Hasegawa Curtis and James Hepburn publicity.6 foreign imprints a doctor, missionary, compiler of the (1815-1911), firstJapanese-English dictionary, and translator of the Bible into Japanese, wrote a single story.Three titles by a journalist and writer of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), fiction, completed the twenty-five volume series. All the writers were residents of Japan. 5. On creped-paper prints (chirimen-e), see Ukiyo-e jiten, Geibundo, 1972), vol. 3, p. 193. compiledbyYoshidaTeruji(Tokyo: in Johannes Justus Rein, The Industries of an Account of ItsAgriculture, Forestry Arts, and Japan: Together with at the Cost of From Travels and Researches Undertaken Commerce. The process is described the Prussian Government 409-411. (New York: A. G. Armstrong, 1889), pp. books seem to have been made exclusively Although creped for the foreign market, their small scale may have been informed by books," so the domestic popularity of mamebon, literally "bean-[size] called after their diminutive size. 6. See the entry for "fairy tales" in Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Trench &Trubner, 1891), p. 149, where Japanese (London: Kegan, Paul, the series. he recommends In addition to these British and American writers with varying degrees of fluency in Japanese, production involved Japanese illustrators and printers. The chief artists in the project were Kobayashi Eitaku (1843-1890) and Suzuki Kason (1860-1919), prolific painters as well as versatile and commercially successful illustrators and newspapers. Because of the multilingual complexity of the production, according to a Chamberlain, Hasegawa only undertook one book at writer.7 and the artist the with and worked time, closely of books, magazines, Like the French and German fairy tales compiled by Perrault and the brothers Grimm, Hasegawa's Japanese fairy tales are fast-paced, simply plotted narratives that combine entertainment and moral instruction inequal (though sometimes competitive) measures. Most unfold in an unspecified time and Charles involve interactions between humans and animals, ogres, demons, or other supernatural creatures, themes having much in common with their European counterparts. in the Some of their leitmotifsalso have analogues canon of children's literature, although European relates children themselves figure only rarely.Momotaro the rise to fame and fortune of a Japanese "Tom Thumb." The hero of Urashima travels to a timeless paradise under the sea, but after returning to the historical world, opens a Pandora's box, forfeiting his perennial youth is the story of a and happiness. Kachi-kachi Mountain trickster?a badger who profits from others' weaknesses. Like Cinderella, The Wooden Bowl, the story of a young woman whose beauty is hidden under a wooden bowl that covers her face, plays on the mistake of judging a person by appearances alone. Like those of Grimm and Perrault also, Japanese fairy tales feature magical good In The fortune, as well as cunning, cruelty, and violence. theDead Trees Blossom, loving Old Man Who Made care of a dog in lifeand death brings an elderly couple Cub's Triumph unexpected wealth and happiness. The offers survival lessons for the small and weak in the form of ruses and trickery.Crabs pinch a monkey to pieces in The Monkey and the Crab, and the protagonist of The to a pulp," but not all evildoers are Silly Jellyfish is "beat severely punished. used many channels of distribution, Hasegawa books reached a worldwide audience. his that ensuring Both creped-paper and plain-paper editions were marketed singly and in sets through the bookshops of theAmerican trading firmof Kelly and Walsh, which had branches inYokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong, 7. More to Lafcadio Hearn, Press, 1936), p. 137. Letters from Basil Hall Chamberlain edited by Kazuo Koizumi (Tokyo: Hokuseido This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Guth: Hasegawa's and Singapore. Maruzen, today still a leading retailer of foreign language books in Japan, purveyed them through itsshops and catalogues, making it likely thatmany books were purchased there as souvenirs. also sold his publications at domestic and Hasegawa international expositions. A sales catalogue from ca. 1915-1920 asserts that his publications were awarded prizes at, among others, expositions in Paris (1900), St. Louis (1904), London (1910), and San Francisco (1915).8 Most books appeared under his own Kobunsha and T. Hasegawa imprints,but he also produced some for British and American publishers including Griffin, Farran & Co. of London and Sydney and Macrae-Smith of fairytales 269 equaled by an appreciation for their design. Sir Henry the father of eight children and the Cole (1808-1882), the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the behind visionary South Kensington Museum (today theVictoria and Albert is credited with first Museum), drawing attention to the importance of quality and style in children's books. His series The Home Treasury of Books, Pictures, Toys &c. Purposed toCultivate theAffections, Fancy, Imagination, and Taste of Children, published in the 1840s, were the firstto feature color-printed illustrations by well-known artists.11 Later, many "serious" writers and illustrators in Britain and America also, in thewords of the scholar of fairy tales U. C. Knoepflmacher, childland."12 "ventured into Philadelphia.9 Despite the large number of Hasegawa's fairy tales still in circulation today?many of them marketed as isdifficult to identifywhere, by antiquarian books?it or were whom, why they originally acquired. Many, no doubt, were bought for reading to or by children: small creped books occupied a special Hasegawa's in this place literary realm because their exotic illustrations physical properties and woodblock-printed as a of view them works Arts and that the art, registered Crafts movement associated with Ruskin, Morris, and acquired Hartford Public Library.Adult Japanophiles also collected them as artifacts throughwhich to imaginatively explore Japan and itsculture. Two American authorities on promote. Drawing inspiration from both Gothic and Japanese arts, itsadvocates sought moral regeneration through a return to simpler, more natural forms of expression. Ruskin's rejection of an aesthetic based on Carolyn Hewins (1846-1926), of children's book collections, a pioneer in the formation some forThe William ElliotGriffis(1843-1928) and Edward Japan, S. Morse (1838-1925), owned copies. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.(1841-1935) and his wife Fanny (1840-1929), enthusiastic Japanophiles who had no children, donated, prints, a set along with a collection of woodblock now of Hasegawa's tale in books the Library of fairy notes to The Griffis each story reveal Congress. appended that he was interested in the "universal" truths the stories revealed. Fanny Holmes, an amateur artist, ismore likely to have used them as sources of inspiration for her Japanese-style embroidered pictures.10 Japanese Fairy Tale Series' arrival on Hasegawa's the international market coincided with what has been called the "golden age of children's literature," an era when a concern with the content of children's books was theirfollowerson both sidesof theAtlantichelped to symmetry and regulation associated with the machine made and celebration of the freedom of expression and irrationalityof the asymmetric inGothic art valorized the same qualities in Japanese art.13 Similarly, the movement's idealization of medieval craftsmen working in freedom from the dictates of the market was easily displaced to Japan. The Arts and Crafts movement's revival of the art of the book also drew inspiration from the sense of design, sensitivity to materials, and technical illuminated manuscripts and quality shared by medieval illustrated books. The Japanese designs of the prolific British illustratorof children's books Walter Crane a prominent (1845-1915), figure in the movement, reveal influences from both sources.14 As artifacts thatmaterialize a textual and visual correlation between 8. For this catalogue, see Japan and the child, Hasegawa's http://shotei.com/publishers/hasegawa/ hasegawa.htm. 9. Copies of The Mouse's The Wooden Bowl, and The Wedding, Fisher Boy Urashima in the Cotsen Collection bear the imprint of Griffin, Farran, and Co., a noted publisher of children's books. 10. On the Hewins collection, see William Hosley, The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (Hartford:Wadsworth Atheneum, is in the Rutgers Library and Morse's 1990), p. 79. Griffis's collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. On Holmes's use of Japanese art, see Christine W. Laidlaw, with Silken Threads: "Painting Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Japanism in Boston," Studies in the Nineteenth-century Decorative Arts 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer, 49. 2003):p. 11. Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden (London:George Allen & Utwin, 1985), Age ofChildren'sLiterature p.ii. 12. U. C. Ventures into Childland, Victorians, Knoepflmacher, Fairy Tales and Press, 1998). Femininity (Chicago: University of Chicago 13. Wendy Kaplan, "The Art That Is Life": The Arts and Crafts Movement inAmerica, 1875-1920 of Fine Arts, (Boston: Museum 1987), p. 54. 14. See Isobel Spencer, Walter 1975), pp. 76-100. Crane This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions (New York: Macmi IIan, 270 RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 fairy tales, arriving just as thewave of Japanism crested in Europe and America, lent themselves particularly well to these moral, social, and aesthetic ideals. Ifownership of a Japanese fairy tale book gave Europeans and Americans a stake in Japanese culture, itwas because of what it represented in their own society. As Susan Pearce has written: Collections lend themselves tomake-believe and the construction of fantasies: adults who collect teddy bears (and many do) are presumably playing out a dream of a golden Edwardian childhood, while thosewho collect Japanese swords are preoccupied with ratherdifferent In our imaginations, collections images. to and other places us.15 open make other times Japanand the cultof childhood The Victorian and Edwardian fetishization of childhood are crucial to and aestheticization in the minds understanding the place Japan occupied of the British and American authors and readers of fairy tales. As Philippe Aries and other Hasegawa's scholars have argued, the notion of childhood is a product of changing historical contexts, but in nineteenth-century Britain and America, children were identified as "others/' existing in an independent state of natural goodness that could be lost unless carefully guided and cultivated. The child was also believed to possess a freedom and spontaneity that adults sought to recapture. (The real-world circumstances of the child, of course, called for a more complex understanding of the childhood dependency on adult discipline as a world of "pure freedom.") This idealization, at a time when many were concerned about the direction their own society was taking, gave symbolic dimensions to an important part of the Japan thatmade its fairy tales Euro-American discourse on childhood. The West's identification of Japan as childish or childlike may have obstructed the nation's exercise of political power, but by the same token, the metaphoric construct of childhood invested itsculture with moral and aesthetic authority. of change and Since growthimpliesthepossibility improvement, however, thismetaphor, paradoxically, pulled both away from and toward modern society. The Euro-American mythologization of childhood has its roots in Romanticism. BothWilliam Blake and William Wordsworth attributed an imaginative vision and spiritual closeness 15. Susan M. (Washington, D.C: to God lost to adults. Mid-Victorian and Collections Pearce, Museums, Objects, Smithsonian Institution, 1992), p. 51. writers carried this belief in childhood innocence into the social and aesthetic sphere, and many rejected the explicitly Christian doctrine that earlier had underpinned it in favor of alternative spiritualities. Ruskin's The King of theGolden River is a nostalgic romantic fantasy that discloses a strong sense of moral protest against materialism and patriarchal authority. The choice of the fairy tale as a vehicle for his protest reflected Ruskin's belief that itwas a genre that stripped away the layers of age and experience of the material world to reveal childhood purity. Ruskin's fixation on eternal youth additionally allowed him to sidestep a problematic relationship to adult sexuality. The yearning for eternal youth in a world of Arcadian simplicity was also a recurrent theme inVictorian and Edwardian children's literature,much of which was written, as Oscar Wilde said of his fairy tales, "partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the child-like faculties of wonder and joy."16As Humphrey Carpenter has pointed out, Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes are filledwith examples of the quest for an escape to happier land: most famously, "The Owl and the Pussycat" who travel to "the Land where the Bong-Tree grows."17 Lewis Carroll's topsy-turvy wonderland was part of this trend, as was the obsession in with creating a "snug, neat littlehome" disclosed Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in theWillows. James Barrie's Pefer Pan, an escapist fantasy that also helped to popularize the equation between fairies and children, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, and A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh are furtherexamples of the genre. Such stories and verses were reassuring, not only for their escapist and nostalgic associations, but for their suggestion of timelessness in the face of disorienting an change. They also helped to channel and provide outlet for adult fantasies and desires that could not be were easily expressed elsewhere. Japan and itsculture versions of these "secret gardens," imaginative spaces where childhood otherness missing in the adult reader's lifecould be rediscovered. Colonialism, missionary activity, and tourism inAfrica and theMiddle and the Far East provided the catalyst for interest in children's tales from and about other cultures. As JenniferSchacker has noted in her recent study of the remaking of fairy tales in nineteenth-century England: 16. Cited (Westport, Conn.: 17. Carpenter 18. Sander, The Fantastic Sublime: inNineteenth-Century Children's Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 4. (see note 11), p.13. inDavid and Transcendence Ibid., p. 117. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Romanticism Fantasy Literature Guth: Hasegawa's "The reading of popular tales?transcribed, translated, as a form of cultural and transnationalized?emerged historical adventure, a space inwhich to encounter and then reflect upon national identities and differences."19 Many of these narratives played to their adult writers' and readers' preoccupation with race and ethnicity, safely situated in a fictional locale. The idea of theOrient firstentered children's literature in retellings of The Arabian Nights, which included the perennially popular "Aladdin and theWonderful Lamp," and later inKipling's retellings of Indian folktales.20 Like Kipling, European and American residents in Japan seized the opportunity to exploit their special knowledge of local culture. The British diplomat Algernon Mitford, Baron Redesdale included a small number in his 7a/es of Old (1837-1932) writerMatilda Chaplin Japan (1871) as did theBritish laterinherChild Life (1846-1883) years Ayrton eight in Japan and Japanese Child Stories (1879). In 1880, Griff is published Japanese FairyWorld: Stories from theWonder-Lore of Japan, featuring thirty-fourstories. Japanese fairy tales have not gone out of style even today: The fourteenth printing of Yei Theodora Ozaki's illustrated The Japanese Fairy Book, first issued in 1903, appeared in 1978.21 Telling tales The cultural, gender, and political positions woven intoHasegawa's Japanese Fairy Tale Series?through their selection, the manner of their retelling, and their illustration?are multiple and layered, but all reveal the complex relations of power and subordination effected through the act of "translation."22 To translate implies a 19. Jennifer Schacker, National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy inNineteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Press, 2003), p. 2. Pennsylvania 20. On the idea of the Orient in fairy tales, see John Stephens and Tales Robyn McCallum, and Metanarratives Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Stories in Children's Literature (New York & London: Garland Inc., 1998), pp. 229-252. Publishing, 21. A. B. Mitford, Tales of Old Japan, 20th printing (Rutland & World: Tokyo:TuttleBooks,2002);William ElliotGriffis, JapaneseFairy Stories from theWonder-Lore of Japan (Schenectady, N.Y.: James H. Barhyte, 1880); Matilda Chaplin Ayrton, Japanese Children and Childlife in Japan (London, 1879; Boston & New York: Heath & Co., & Tokyo: 1901);Yei TheodoraOzaki, TheJapaneseFairyBook (Rutland Tuttle Books, 1978). 22. The word "translation" must be understood in itsbroadest sense. Some of the stories, most notably Hearn's The Boy Who Drew Cats, have no exact counterparts, while others, such as Chamberlain's are My Lord Bag-o'-Rice, only loosely based on Japanese versions. The question of sources is further complicated by the existence of many fairytales 271 certain degree of endorsement?the desire to appropriate thewords, as well as the ideas and values behind them. Fairy tales provided their tellers entry into a perceived Japanese cultural authenticity that, once reformatted and translated, also became a vehicle for the assertion and superimposition of their own "adult" values and images of Japan. The publisher and illustratorswere similarly engaged in a process of redefiningwhat was supposedly authentically Japanese, but their national representations, destined foran interpretive community of which they were not a part, were not necessarily read in theway intended. The translators imposed theirWestern agenda by classifying these books as "fairy tales" rather than "tales of long ago," the more literal and neutral rendering of mukashi banashi, the title that appears in Japanese on each book's fly leaf (fig. 2). Hasegawa's adoption of this term is an example of the "retrofitting"of Japanese literaryand artistic forms intoWestern epistemologies thatwas a hallmark of theMeiji era, a process inwhich both Japanese and Euro-Americans were invested as part of the perceived need to modernize and market Japanese culture. In Europe, fairy tales had been understood since the late eighteenth century as a genre destined primarily for children, based on the romantic assumption that a "are relics of culture's they early beginnings, and that children are beings who trail 'clouds of glory' from that ideal mythic past towhich only they have unmediated access."23 Although there are no fairies in Japanese fairy tales, in the eyes of theWest these texts bore many of the markers of this familiar class of literature:They are brief narratives using a limited range of vocabulary and ample illustrations; they involve interaction between humans and animals and supernatural beings; their authors are unknown, part of an ancient vernacular tradition handed down over the generations, usually through female If voices; and they often have a simple moral message. immature, itfollowed that Japan was developmentally itsvisual and literaryexpressions were also temporally distant. Yet, by the same token, this projected antiquity also made fairy tales sources of wisdom. As the biblical injunction "out of the mouths of babes" reminds us, children may teach through the example of their innocence. variant versions of the most popular mukashi banashi. On this subject, see ehon no kenkyu to shiryo Uchigaki Yuriko, Edoki mukashibanashi (Studyand Resourceson Edo PeriodTales of LongAgo) (Tokyo: Miyai shoten, 1999). 23. Elizabeth Harries, Twice upon a Time: Women Writers Wanning and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 11. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 272 RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 " ' a l| * K ' THE HARE OF INABA. , . ^ ^ -isi* > |' * *- ^^^^^^^^^^ eig^-^ Uj the early eighteenth century by Shibukawa Seiemon.25 as marking Although this series isoften characterized the beginning of "children's literature,"most of the stories predate the creation of this category. The firstfive inHasegawa's series all figured among so-called "red-back books," akahon, popular illustrated tales also published over the course of the eighteenth century.26 The signifying and referential capacities of the fairy tale genre were enormous, and by their retellings in European languages, their Japanese meanings were altered, extended, and even obliterated. Although most stories open with a variation of the familiar phrase "once upon a time" (ima wa mukashi), theywere simplified by eliminating place names, dates, and other specifics that resonated with Japanese but not foreign audiences.27 Each author brought to the project a different agenda, were personally selecting those stories with themes that books ??*to wboie Kingdom. | liBfeM Figure 2. Kobayashi Eitaku,publication data and opening page fromThe Hare oflnaba. Plain paper book, 71Ax 5 in., 1886. Author's known from the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries. The Wooden Bowl and Urashima were included in "The Library" (Otogi bunko), a series of twenty Companion books published in three illustratedwoodblock-printed collection. desirableand thenartfully and culturally blendinghis By this logic, fairy tales made itpossible for their transnational readers to tap into the roots of Japan's rich cultural tradition, providing manifold frames of reference for imagining the country. Like rock strata in which one can read the passage of time and thereby discover the connection between ancient and modern structures, fairy tales suggested modalities of social as organization, behavior, and aesthetic values of Japan a whole, both past and present. They offered a means of capturing the "natural" foundations of Japan, stripped of contextual ambiguities. In a genre where therewas no precise relationship between fact and fiction, moreover, itwas possible to read a wide variety of meanings. As microcosms of Japan, they also stimulated reflection and facilitated comparison with other traditional tales. The sense that Hasegawa's fairy tales tapped into was not altogether misplaced. Japan's deepest past The Serpent with Eight Heads, Princes Fireflash and Firefade, and The Hare oflnaba are all stories that can be traced back to the eighth-century Nihonshoki and Kojiki, the earliest written records of Japan. The Old Man and theDevils figures inUji shui monogatari, a twelfth-century compendium.24 Others were transmitted in the form of illustrated handscrolls and albums or her own ideas of what a fairy tale should be into the narrative. Each also brought a distinctive voice, enlivening the prose by means of various techniques that add color, texture, and flavor. For Thompson, the Presbyterian missionary whose six translations launched the series, fairy tales were no doubt a part of his proselytizing mission. This sense of instrumentality,of course, went to the heart of the Euro-American civilizing agenda. It is easy to imagine, for instance, how The Tongue-Cut Sparrow lent itself to interpretation as an analogue to Biblical parables about the rewards of virtue and punishments of greed, a Buddhist although the tale was originally cast within framework. Readers of the red-backed book version of the tale would have immediately recognized this from the characterization of the hero as having the spirit of jihi, a term denoting compassion for all living beings.28 They also would have interpreted the interaction 25. Ruch, "Otogi Bunko and Short Stories of the Period/' Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965. See Kinsei kodomo no ehonshu (Illustrated Children's Books See Barbara Muromachi 26. of the Early Modern Era), comp. Suzuki Juzo and Hida Kozo (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 18-72. for instance, 27. The akahon version of Bumbuku chagama, no sado identifies the firstowner of the kettle as a "Higashiyamadono a monk who specialized in tea ceremony employed by the These descriptive details fifteenth-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. are omitted in The Wonderful Tea-Kettle. See ibid., p. 36. 28. Ibid., p. 24. bozu," 24. Ancient Tales. Selected Tales inModern Japan: An Anthology and translated by Fanny Hagin Mayer Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. vii-viii. of Japanese (Bloomington: Folk This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Guth: Hasegawa's between humans and animals in terms of the Buddhist belief in transmigration and the potential for rebirth in animal form, not as a manifestation of an imaginary child's world. Hepburn's friendship with Thompson, a fellow missionary, may have led him to participate in venture. His single contribution, The Old Hasegawa's Man and theDevils, is an odd tale about a woodcutter who is happily relieved of a disfiguring wen on the side of his face by "devils" forwhom he performs a dance. His choice of the freightedword "devil" to render the word oni, more commonly translated today as demon or ogre, however, is a revealing sign of the kind of Christian signifiers that became part of these translations. Kate James's retellings allowed her to explore creatively themes thatwere applicable to her own in Japan, often projecting a child-rearing experiences Victorian sentimentalism not present in the original versions. The gender roles, behaviors, and occupations of the men and women whofesided there often differed from those at home, and James also sought to stake out literaryterritoryfor herself, even as her books served as an extension of her parental role.29 Her friend Chamberlain brought to his fairy tales a narrative style and avuncular tone absent in his schofarly translations, which included the eighth-century Kojiki. While these stories may have helped to secure his credentials as a popular observer of and Western guide to Japan for his Hearn with reveals that both readers, correspondence men were criticized for a in vein."30 "indulging lighter Chamberlain's retelling of The Serpent with Eight Heads, for instance, begins: "Did you ever hear of the Eight headed Serpent? Ifnot, Iwill tell itto you. It is rather a long one, and we must go a good way back to get to the beginning of it. In fact,we must go back to the beginning of theworld." His language inMy Lord Bag-o'-Rice may have been inspired by Arthurian tales of medieval chivalry that he had read as a child: The protagonist is a brave warrior who "sallies forth to seek adventures" as part of his mission of "waging war against the King's enemies." Although it is hard to gauge the elision of lifeand literature, his correspondence suggests that Chamberlain, a lifelong bachelor who lost his mother at 29. Noteworthy women writers on Japan include Ayrton (see note 21), Alice Mabel Bacon, with her Japanese Girls and Women (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1891), and Julia Carrother, who wrote The Sunrise Kingdom: Or Life and Scenes in Japan, and Woman's Work forWomen There (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of 1879). Publication, 30. The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, edited with an introduction by Elizabeth Bisland (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.), p. 111. fairytales 273 a young age, may have been attracted to Japanese fairy tales because they enabled him a pleasurable regression to childhood. Chamberlain believed that "childhood has chiefly joys."31Was the potential to recover these familiar but now distant joys what prompted him to engage with Japanese fairy tales? text also reveals how these littlebooks Chamberlain's mediated Japanese culture to the exported heavily West. When the protagonist ofMy Lord Bag-o'-Rice is feasted at a dwarfs underwater residence, "dinner [was] brought inon trays shaped like the leaves of water lilies. The dishes were watercress leaves, not real ones, but much more beautiful than real ones: for theywere of water-green porcelain with a shimmer of gold; and the like black chopsticks were of beautiful petrified wood water it As wine in for the looked like the cups, ivory. but ittastedall right, what did itslookssignify?"Inthis brief description, Chamberlain conveys the Japanese sensitivity to nature, a gift formaking utilitarian articles beautiful, while at the same timewittily alerting the reader that sake, contrary to expectations, is tasty. In Japan, he reminds us, appearances may be deceiving. IfChamberlain saw himself as guide to the visible, Hearn saw himself as guide to the invisible Japan, an engagement that allows us tomove from the external to the internal spaces animated by Japan's figuration as a child. As he declared inGlimpses of Unfamiliar japan, to understand and communicate the inner lifeof itspeople required dealing with conceptions of the supernatural and their relationship to the "emotional nature of the people."32 Believing that "superstition in Japan has a sort of shorthand value inexplaining eternal and valuable things," he used his fairy tales to define what he wanted to see as characteristic of his adopted people, reshaping each tale to suit his personal needs and vision to a far greater degree than the other writers.33 A life-long fascination with artistic genius and love of the fantastic, both qualities he associated with childhood, animate Hearn's contributions to Hasegawa's series. In a letter to Chamberlain, Hearn argued that the of earliest childhood?so intense and yet so "feelings the in weirdest human vague?are experience, and for the best of reasons: they are really ghostly'."34 Although written long before the appearance of Freud's essay 31. Letters from Basil Hall to Lafcadio Hearn, comp. Chamberlain Press, 1936), p. 27. (Tokyo: Hokuseido 32. Lafcadio Hearn, of Unfamiliar Japan. 2 vols. (Boston Glimpses and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1894), vol. 1, pp. v-vi. 33. The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (see note 30), p. 68. 34. Ibid., p. 212. Kazuo Koizumi This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 274 "The Uncanny" (1919), Hearn intuited theway that "the strange and the inexplicable, the most unhomely and weird of things or places, will turnout in the end to be not strange at all, but thatwhich is familiar and well known, though subjected to suppression, usually inearly childhood."35 InHearn's eyes, the fantastic was a positive force essential to artistic creativity. The protagonist of The Boy Who Drew Cats, the story of a farmer's son who becomes the disciple of a Buddhist priest, drew cats "because he could not really help it.He had what is called 'the genius of an artist/" and "just for that reason he was not quite fit to be an acolyte." The disobedient boy trumps his master through the magical power of artwhen cats he has painted on the sliding doors of a temple come to lifeand kill the giant rats that had caused itto be abandoned by humans (fig. 3). Hearn's other fairy tales similarly interweave motifs intended to bring out what he believed to be the collective mentality of all Japan. His defense of the mysteries and beauties of the country manifests a romantic imperialism shared by other fin-de-siecle writers who sought in Japan an alternative toWestern rationalism. Yet forHearn, a transforming Japan into place where his imagination could roam was as much a retreat from theWest as from the disappointments of modern Japan. Fairytale Japan was often a place where the adult West went to resolve itsuncertainties, only to rediscover and experience them all the more acutely. The storytelling process stimulated reveries that allowed Hearn to retrieve his own past. As Carolyn Steedman has observed, "The idea of the child was used both to recall and to express the past that each individual lifecontained: what was turned inside in the course of individual development was thatwhich was latent: the child was the story to be told."36 Since Hearn saw Japan as simultaneously feminine and childlike, itsfairy tales gave him the occasion to look back nostalgically and reconnect with a maternal ideal. In The Dream of a Summer Day his identitymerges with that of the hero of the fairy tale Urashima, who marries a beautiful sea-maiden but, longing for his family above the sea, leaves this paradise, never to return,because he had lost the "charm." In this "tale," however, Hearn has lost his mother, not his wife.37 For this oversensitive, anchorless 35. Carolyn Idea of Human and the Childhood Steedman, Strange Dislocations: (London: Virago Press, 1995), p. Inferiority, 1780-1930 149. Ibid., p. 11. 37. Cited in Louis Allen, "Lafcadio Hearn and Ushaw in Sukehiro Hirakawa, Lafcadio Hearn ed., Rediscovering 1997), pp. 141-142. writer, Japanese fairy tales simultaneously mapped an external and an internal development. Prompting more than a reflection on his early experiences, they where he could redirected him to a state of inferiority "charm"?lost reclaim an innate aesthetic sensibility?a to adulthood. were integral to the books' Although illustrations design and overall effect, Hearn is the only author who seems to have commented on their quality or suitability " to his narrative. "In the case of my own story, he wrote, "I think thatmuch of the delicate beauty of the charming saw as a drawings is lost in the crepe edition." What he an asset: was exotic in however, defect, eyes Hasegawa's was willing to sacrificeprintedlegibility The publisher to tactile appeal because thiswas what sold. Hearn also unless declared that he would not write forHasegawa his stories were "prettily illustrated."38The delicately colored illustrations inChin-chin Kobakama, a story about toothpicks that come to lifeat night in the form of an army of tiny soldiers that scare a selfish young into good behavior, met these expectations (fig. 4). Hearn may have had no say in the choice of Suzuki Kason as illustrator,but this artist's visualization of the woman dead on thetemplefloor(fig.3) giantgoblin-ratlying effectively captures theAmerican 36. Oriental, Figure 3. Suzuki Kason, Rat killed by the acolytes' painted cats fromThe BoyWho Drew Cats. Creped book, 9 x 51/2in., 1898. Courtesy Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. College," (Global 38. Some New and edited by Sanki taste for the fantastic. Letters and Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Collected Ichikawa (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1925), p. 320. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Guth: Hasegawa's i:;>'.:' ; fairytales 275 X' i :' ':' "".=.:" =":::"-- Figure4. Suzuki Kason (?), scene fromChin-chin Kobakama. Creped book, 9 x 5V2 in., 1903. Courtesy Department of Special Collections, StanfordUniversity Libraries. Figure 5. Kobayashi Eitaku,goblins fromThe Tongue-Cut Sparrow. Creped book, 6x4 in., 1885. Author's collection. This and other illustrations in the series, such as Eitaku's terrifyingfinale to The Tongue-Cut Sparrow (fig. 5), also conformed to the view widely held in Britain and America that Japanese artwas fantastic and grotesque.39 Western readers would have been unable to identify the artistswho illustrated the fairy tales since their names do not figure on the cover or fly leaf, and when in do, appear they only Japanese (fig. 2). For the books' international audience, however, individual artistic identitieswere less important than the aura of Japanese these familiar tales theymade rhetorical choices reflecting the visual idioms of the 1880s and 1890s, a time of intense romantic historicizing in the arts destined for both domestic and international audiences. This characteristic isparticularly pronounced in the illustrations lent the authenticity thewoodblock-printed text.The style of many of the illustrations follows artistic paradigms already familiar to many Western viewers through Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated books of the Edo period (1600-1867). Both the animal and the series are especially illustrations figural throughout an artistwhose work indebted to Hokusai (1760-1849), was widely known in Europe and America. Yet the fairy tale books' illustrators, no less than thewriters, were operating from a cultural position of distance: These stories were part of their personal and national past, real or imagined, and one they could recover only imperfectly. Both Eitaku and Kason drew inspiration from preexisting pictorial conventions, but in representing 39. See The Idea of Japan 1853-1895: JohnAshmead, Japan as and Other Travelers from theWest (New York by American and London: Garland Publishing, 1987), pp. 461^62. Described work of Eitaku, who illustrated fourteen of the twenty five volumes in the series. His attentiveness to costume and other "realistic" details lends his illustrations an aura of historical authenticity, as itwas understood at the time (fig.6). The robes, hair, moustache, and goatee of the protagonist ofMy Lord Bag-o'-Rice and The Hare oflnaba, for instance, conform to projections of Japan's classical antiquity. These projections are also found in contemporary paintings, prints, and decorative arts, including Eitaku's own rendition of the legendary figures Izanami and Izanagi creating the Japanese islands (fig. 7). The low horizon line, sense of perspective, and strong linearity that distinguish his style also can be found in much of the graphic work of the period. The artists did not tailor their illustrations to the or Euro needs or expectations of children?Japanese American?but used the same pictorial language and approach they did inbook and newspaper illustrations for the domestic adult market. Full-page and double page illustrations, visual-verbal puns, and rebuses had been integral to adult fiction in Japan since the seventeenth century, partly because woodblock printing facilitated the combination of text and image on the This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 276 RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 projects a childlike nature on Japan ina way that they never had in their original milieu. Although there is nothing in the illustrations' style that identifies them as juvenile, Western readers' construction of Hasegawa's fairy tales as "children's literature"was based in part on the presumed relationship between young readers and picture books. Accidental impositions derived from the Western printing process furthercontributed to these transferred assumptions. The large and often clumsy typeface, wide spaces between lines, odd spacing of letters,and occasional erroneous letters found throughout the series reinforce the "childlike" character ascribed to the books, and, by extension, their nation of origin. Figure 6. Kobayashi Eitaku, the young brother and thewounded hare fromThe Hare of Inaba. Plain paper book, 7Va x 5 in., 1886. Author's collection. same page. Adult Japanese readers' expectations of engagement with books thus involved a level of visual-verbal interplay beyond that of theirWestern books counterparts. As seen in figure 2, Hasegawa's offerWestern consumers something of this experience by leaving the publication data, including the artist's name, in Japanese characters, on the fly-leaf-facing story's opening lines, in Roman letters.On the firstpage of The Hare of Inaba, moreover, the publisher used rebus-like designs: The word "now" is formed from a rope that insinuates itself into the page and the reader's frame of vision, then loops up, down, and around to form the letters "n," "o," and "w," which in turn provide a playground for a pair of cavorting hares. Elsewhere, words and images spill across the page, and sometimes across the facing one as well, both heightening the drama of the story and propelling the eye forward. In some instances, a passage is interrupted by an image in the middle of a page, or, conversely, a full-page image may contain only a short passage. While these design features lend Hasegawa's fairy tales an aura of cultural authenticity, the consumer's apprehension of their text-image relationship was defined by the frame of the translated book rather than itsoriginal, culturally and historically specific context. Both the translation and use of illustrationswith text in the Japanese manner produce a unified body of symbolic and discursive elements thatwould otherwise be difficult to connect. At the same time the reconstitution of these elements in the context of the Japanese Fairy Tale Series Object lessons A distinctive feature of Hasegawa's Japanese Fairy Tale Series is that they are printed on paper that has been creped, giving them theweight, softness, and intimacy of fabric. Even the covers, decorated with woodblock printed illustrations frontand back, and identifying them as Japanese fairy tales, are treated in thisway. Since they lack stiffboards and spines, there is no clear separation between the covers and pages of the book. There are no end-papers. The books' artifactual distinctiveness is further reinforced by the knotted threads that hold together the pages of the book, rendering text into textile. These tactile qualities transport the reader into an aesthetic realm beyond the brittle culture of the printed word by intensifying the book's materiality. The creping process thus shifts the book's status from an object to be studied primarily with the educated eye to one to be experienced by the touch. While touch has aesthetic implications, it is also the mode through which preliterate children experience theworld, one defined by the domestic maternal. The child's firstcontact is not with words on a page, but with the things around her? the yielding fabric of a mother's dress, a favorite stuffed animal or a cloth doll. To hold the limp book open, an act requiring two hands, becomes a kind of submission and surrender to theworld of childhood. At the same time, the unfamiliar creping of the page preserves the touch of Japan, giving an exotic undercurrent to the experience. Such dressed-up books charmed and entertained people of all ages by their quality of unusual playthings. The toy had been a ubiquitous trope for Japan since the 1850s, when regular trade was established with Europe and the United States. The cargo of the firstcommercial ship to reach San Francisco was laden with items of "useful and ornamental interest," including "toys for This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Guth: Hasegawa's fairytales 277 children, fanciful and unique/'40 Toys and games also figured prominently in thewritings of nineteenth-century diplomats, missionaries, merchants, scholars, and tourists to Japan.Western visitors were impressed by thewide range of toys available to children, some so ingenious that theymight "create a revolution in the nurseries Elliot Griffis,whose teaching of England."41William in 1871 and 1873 formed between experiences Japan the basis for his immensely popular The Mikado's Empire (1876), asserted that "during the last two centuries and a half, previous to the coming of foreigners, the main business of this nation was play." And, he went on, "We do not know of any country in theworld inwhich there are so many toy-shops, or so many fairs for the sale of the thingswhich delight children."42 Stereotypes of a child-centered culture remained pervasive well into the twentieth century, leading many scholars of Japan to act on the basis of that identification. Edward Morse formed a large collection of Japanese toys during his two trips to Japan and devoted a lengthy chapterto thesubject inhisJapanDay byDay (1917), and the ethnologist Frederick Starr also undertook a study of "traditional" Japanese toys to gain a better understanding of the culture that had produced them.43 As both Morse and Starr observed, many of the articles characterized as toyswere not in fact intended for children's amusement, but were articles of talismanic value relating to religious or seasonal rituals or designed to fulfill some practical function. Their small scale and their delicate craftsmanship, however, frequently led to their characterization as playthings, which is how Clarence Cook, the American author of The House Beautiful (1881), classified netsuke, the tiny ivory toggles made to hold small medicine cases inplace on the obi. Praising them on the one hand for their artistic quality, while on the other, dismissing them as fanciful trifles,he argued that "money iswell spent on reallygood bitsofworkmanshipof any peoplewho have brought delicacy of hand and exquisite perception to the making of what are in reality toys. A Japanese in Japan F.Van Zandt, Pioneer American Merchants 40. Howard (Tokyo: Lotus Press, 1981), pp. 177-178. 41. Laurence Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan in the Years 1857, '58, '59. 2 vols. (Edinburgh, & Sons, 1859), vol. 2, p. 218. Elliot Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, 6th ed. (New York: 452^53. & 1890), Bros., pp. Harper 43. Edward Sylvester Morse, Japan Day by Day, 1877, 1878-79, 1882-83. 2 vols. (Boston and New York; Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917); Transactions of the Frederick Starr, "Japanese Toys and Toy Collectors/' London: Blackwood 42. William Asiatic Society of Japan 2nd series, III (1926):pp. 101-116. Figure 7. Kobayashi Eitaku, Izanagi and Izanami Creating the Japanese Islands.Hanging scroll, inkand colors on silk,89 x 2Vh in. 1880-1890s. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection 11.7972. Photograph? 2008 Museum of FineArts, Boston. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 278 RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 . . . has ivory-carving or wood carving of the best kind a great deal that lifts itabove the notion of a toy. It is a toy, a button, a useless thing, or nearly useless, but it is often as poetically or wittily conceived as ifthe artist had a commission from the state. Then it is sure to be ... A child's taste pleasant and soothing to the touch. and delicacy of perception will be more surely fed by the constant habit of seeing and playing with a few of the best bits of ivorycarving his family can procure. . . ,"44 The collector Louisine Havemeyer's firstencounter with the small brocade-encased brown ceramic jars used in the tea ceremony discloses a similar attitude. As she laterwrote: "I found ithad a silk bag and upon undoing the silk bag, my little "brownie" revealed himself to me. Like a child with a toy I soon had rows of brownies . about me. . . What pretty, dainty things they appeared to me."45 For Havemeyer, removing a tea jar from its brocade bag was like undressing a doll. In the nineteenth-century Euro-American attitudes toward Japanese miniaturization, we may read not only the fantasy that small things are by definition playthings but also a false alignment of size with childhood.46 It was easy to draw an analogy between the playthings and the cultural infancy of Japan, a "young" nation requiring the protection of adults, one thatmust be nursed along in this evolutionary process with special care since it was likely to assume the characteristics of itscaretaker. This notion, of course, is fundamental to the patriarchal authoritarianism of imperialism and colonialism, but italso linked Japanese cultural exports including small fairy tale books to the domestic Hasegawa's ideologies prevalent in nineteenth-century Europe and America, an identification reinforced by the metaphoric construction of Japan as feminine. In this ideology, mothers were both behavioral models and instructors whose duty itwas to provide an environment thatwould stimulate artistic taste and moral awareness. Such beliefs and practices contributed to the symbolic value ascribed educational and well to ownership of Hasegawa's books. designed While Japan's configuration as a child was a dominant organizing principle formuch nineteenth-century the figure thinking about the country and itsculture, 44. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York: Dover 1995), p. 102. Publications, of a Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs 45. Louisine W. Havemeyer, Collector (New York: Ursus Press, 1993), p. 74. see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives 46. On miniaturization, of theMiniature, Duke University the Gigantic, Press, 1993), the Souvenir, ch. 2. the Collection (Durham: of the Japanese child was also appropriated as part of a Euro-American project of understanding social development. Japanese children deserved close attention because theywere a barometer of the country's progress in Britain and the and thus models forothers?especially United States where therewas growing worker unrest or large immigrant populations. How did Japanese was infantsbecome so obedient and well-mannered?as endlessly argued? How were Japanese children taught to act the proper way to become productive members in ''civilizing" of society? Might Japan provide guidance as to Japan Even visitors carried immigrant populations? their sentimentalized projections of ideal childhood, to its citizens innocents who needed to be likening for adulthood, they also recognized that the groomed West could learn from Japanese child-rearing practices. In Japan, itwas held, babies never cried. Japanese children, moreover, were good-tempered and well behaved, despite the fact that their parents never appeared to discipline them.47Hearn picked up on this trope in his introduction to Chin-chin Kobama, the story of "fairies who tease and frighten those very few naughty children" in Japan. A little Japanese girl, he claims, "does not break her doll. No, she takes great care of it,and keeps iteven after she becomes a woman and ismarried." Commercial photographs and book illustrations of mothers carrying infantson their backs or fatherswith littleboys on their laps,widely disseminated in theWest, furtherunderscored the affecting vision of Japan as a child-centered country where both parents were deeply engaged in child-rearing (fig.8). Such idealized scenes of cozy domesticity and tender parental affection no doubt resonated particularly deeply among the "imaginatively and emotionally deprived" men "banished from theworld of nurturance" or brought up in a world of patriarchal authoritarianism.48 Ifthe abundance of toys, affectionate upbringing, and lack of harsh discipline made Japan a "paradise of babies," italso made itso for adults. Chamberlain enshrined this view in his Things Japanese while at the same time revealing his equation with degeneracy: of Japanese maturation are Japan has been called "a paradise of babies." The babies indeed generally so good as to help tomake ita paradise foradults. They are well-mannered fromthe cradle and the to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports 47. See They Came of Japan, 1543-1640, (Berkeley: University comp. Michael Cooper (see note 39), pp. of California Press, 1965), pp. 62-63 and Ashmead 423-432. 48. Knoepflmacher (see note 12), pp. 8, 9, 20. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Guth: Hasegawa's fairytales 279 Japanese, the most gracious, the most courteous, and the most smiling of all peoples, whose rural districts and form,with Through-the-looking-Glass-Country three of dreams/'51 When Wonderland, merry kingdoms the painter Whistler concluded his celebrated "Ten O'clock" speech of 1885 on true and false artwith an to Japan, the British poet Swinburne penned a rejoinder reminding his readers that "they were not in a serious world; that theywere in the fairy-land of fans, in the paradise of pipkins . . ,and all the fortuitous frippery encomium of Fusi-yama."52 imaginative construct of Japan as childishly and irrationally resistant to the disciplinary order of the West was central to its identification as a land of fantasy The Father and Children. William Elliot Figure 8. Illustrationof fatherand child from Griffis'sTheMikado's Empire (1913). boys inparticular are perfectly free fromthatgawky shyness which makes many English boys,when incompany, such afflictionsboth to others and to themselves. Pity thata little latertheyare apt to deteriorate, the Japanese young man being less attractive than his eight or ten-year-oldbrother, becoming obtrusive.49 self-conscious, self-important, and sometimes Chamberlain's comments underscore the problem of using childhood as a cultural metaphor: Logic implies that a child will grow up, but the power relations of romantic imperialism require that youth be eternal. Marketing fairyland Japan In addition to their pleasurable association with toys, books assumed extratextual resonance Hasegawa's from Japan's identification as a fairyland inhabited by "little people" resembling elves and fairies. Hearn found confirmation of this expectation upon arrival in the country: "Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everyone is small and queer and mysterious."50 Dilke, a British traveler, also described Japan as an "elf land," and added: "All who love children must love the In Japan, the irrational trumped the and make-believe. rational and the familiar structures of society to the point of "topsy-turvydom." "Instances of this contrarity" included, according to Chamberlain, "Japanese books ... A Japanese (of begin at what we should call the end. the old school) mounts his horse on the right. . . boats are hauled up on the beach stern first. . . and they carry babies, not in their arms but on their backs."53 This view of Japan as possessed of an unpredictable mentality, however, did not take into account the potential violence that is the darker side of childhood. When they firstappeared, Hasegawa's Japanese Fairy Tale Series excited considerable curiosity and captured a wider audience than theymight today because of the emerging interest in fairy tales as defining elements of national character in Europe, Britain, and the United States. The fear that this evidence of Japan's "youth" would disappear as the country matured also served as an impetus for recording them in European languages. As Hearn wrote in a letter to Chamberlain: "The opening of crime. . . . Fairyland is the country was very wrong,?a already dead."54 Yet even as the designation "fairy tale" cut the stories out of their Japanese sociocultural context and resituated them within an established Western literarygenre, italso provided a familiar framework guaranteed to draw the attention of their intended 51. Toshio Yokoyama, Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of (London: Macmillan Press, 1987), pp. Images of a Nation Stereotyped 158-159. in Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 52. Cited American p. 83. 53. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Japanese Things, Being Notes on Connected with Japan (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo: Subjects Turtle Books, 1971), pp. 480^81. Various (see note 6), p. 92. (see note 32), vol. 1, p. 2. 49. Chamberlain 50. Hearn 54. The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions (see note 30), p. 249. 280 RES 53/54 SPRING/AUTUMN 2008 audience. This was crucial in the 1880s and 1890s, when therewas as yet littleJapanese literature intended for the nonspecialist reader in Western languages, much less a coherent historical survey. The difficulty thatMitford experienced in collecting the nine fairy tales included in his Tales of Old Japan, the most widely read English-language Japanese literary text in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, testifies thatmany Japanese were sensitive to these demeaning perceptions of Japan.55The young men of warrior-class background Griffis taught first in Fukui domain and later inTokyo were also deeply embarrassed by "fairy tales" because they dramatized to Japan's detriment the backward, superstitious beliefs held by the lower classes. Even writing about them was an affront to their dignity.56 Progressive Japanese were concerned about their national self-presentation as childish vis-a-vis the modern world, but as Gerald Figal has argued in Civilization and Monsters, the "objects of fantasy and folk beliefs?ghosts, goblins, monsters and mysteries of roles in the constitution fundamental every sort?played of modernity inMeiji Japan." These "mirror images of the modern, reverse sides of the myth of constant progress" led to "both a negative repression and management of beliefs inmonsters and spirits and a positive identification of 'Japanese' mentality with their as they are "conceived as pests to production." Even the modern project, targeted for extermination through education or even legislation," they are "incorporated intomodern capitalist and libidinal economies as commodities to soothe psychic needs, fascinate desires, line the pockets of entrepreneurs."57 Hasegawa was surely aware that classifying his as originally publications as "fairy tales" marked them Euro-Americans written been by people having understood to be childish or childlike, and that in so and was helping to authorize a vision of Japan doing he that played intoWestern stereotypes. His market-driven decision to title them in thisway suggests his acute sensitivity toWestern consumers' tastes and desires. By on the cover of each prominently featuring these words of his books, Hasegawa knowingly situated them within an established English literarygenre that conformed to (note 21), p. 405. is clear from the essays his students wrote, now at filed under "Fairy tales and other stories" in the Griffis Collection 55. See Mitford 56. This attitude Rutgers University. in and Monsters: 57. Gerald Figal, Civilization Spirits of Modernity Meiji Japan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 6, 15, 7. Western expectations of Japan, thereby assuring them a wide readership. By this shrewd strategy he further associated his publishing house with an open-ended number of fairy tales, thereby inducing readers to buy more than one volume of a series. Much has been made of theMeiji-era slogan fukoku "rich country strong army/' but what is not often kyohei, is that the government's efforts to promote acknowledged prosperity through international trade often necessitated conforming toWestern fantasies of Japan. The aesthetics cater to the of desire demanded that Hasegawa notions of his intended audience, accepting, imaginative adjusting, and reinforcing the very stereotypes thatmany government officials and intellectuals sought to dispel. Hasegawa may have recognized the implications of his activities, leaving the task of challenging the childlike image of Japan to intellectuals such as Okakura Kakuzo, who addressed this issue in The Book of Tea (1906): Those who cannot feel the littlenessof great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of littlethings inothers. The averageWesterner, inhis sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instanceof the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace; he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughteron Manchurian battlefields.58 Hasegawa's publications reached the peak of their at the very moment that Japan began its popularity inAsia, achieving aggressive imperialist expansion and against victories against China in 1894-1895 events that galvanized the Russia in 1904-1905, West's attention. These developments, making Japan the dominant imperialist power in East Asia and thus a threatening mirror image of Britain and the United States, intensified both the need to see Japan as paradoxically inferior,dependent, and vulnerable and the potential for Euro-American identification of Japan as a child.59 tactility and exotic content, Japanese Fairy Tale Series satisfied this need contact with Japanese by providing unmediated physical a culture in miniature form that could be enjoyed within the safety of the home. Travel to Japan tapped a desire With their endearing Hasegawa's for self-transformation; small fairy tale books magically carried out the same process by encouraging the reader The Book of Tea (New York: Dover Okakura, 1964 edition), Publications, pp. 2-3. 59. This fascination with the child coexisted with that of the 58. Kakuzo samurai. Nitobe and mirrored Inazo's Bushido: The Soul of Japan this phenomenon. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions (1899) both shaped Guth: Hasegawa's to imagine a life in another country and another time. Yet they did not so much make possible the discovery of Japanese authenticity as the authentic experience of a childhood forwhich the reader had a deep and abiding nostalgia. The denial of political coeval status to Japan was part of the structure of patriarchal imperialism that the West imposed on Japan. Although "young" Japan fit into deterministic schemes of the linearityof progress and stages of history the psychological potentiality of this image also made ita site for the expression of the fears and anxieties as well as the hopes of theWest. Power in the form of social or political dominance isoften with the of idealization coupled vulnerability. Alienation and pessimism about conditions in the modern West ledmany in Britain and America to view the presumed childlike quality of the Japanese as a desirable attribute lost to their own inauthentic world. Even the apparent and model behavior of the children of these happiness childlike people offered an implicit rebuke to modern Western society. The multiple political, social, cultural, and psychological agendas of Hasegawa's Japanese Fairy Tale Series speak to the complexity of what we might now call globalization. Although the tales' production and distribution was closely tied to the engines of economic and technological progress, to theirWestern consumers, their contents, illustration, and creping embodied resistance to these developments. Their innocence and imaginative freedom inscribed a redemptive quality, which consumers eagerly embraced in the hope of recapturing what had been lost to their own lives. In the words of theAmerican painter John La Farge, Japanese artists possessed "the simplicity of attitude inwhich we were once children." To experience it is "to live again in the oneness of mind and feeling which is to open to us the doors of the kingdom."60 isboth a space and a time, and, Childhood paradoxically, the political infantilization of Japan as a nation made itall the more powerful a site for the psychological journey back into childhood?a journey of affective identification made possible through Japanese artifacts such as tiny netsuke, tea ceremony utensils, and Hasegawa's Japanese fairy tale books. The wide dissemination and enduring popularity of these Japanese fairy tales serve as reminders that to infantilize is also to endow a culture with extraordinary power, to turnwhat ismarginal into central. 60. John La Farge, "Bric-a-Brac," Century 46, no. 24 (1893):p. 429. This content downloaded from 193.62.214.1 on Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:11:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions fairytales 281