Ultra-Influencers: The Two British Fictional Victorians that Changed Japan

 

 

The Japanese literary critic and writer, Yasunari Sadao (1885-1924), for instance, adapted The Man with the Twisted Lip in 1912 in his work The Stone Lantern, Kasuga Doro, after coming across the famed English detective in The Jewish Lamp, a 1907 adaptation by Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941) in which Holmes, the gentleman detective, confronts Leblanc’s gentleman thief Arsene Lupin.

Others such as the popular contemporary mystery and crime writer Mizuki Tsujimura, for instance, first encountered Sherlock Holmes as a child, but only really “met” the detective in the BBC series Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which inspired her to read the full editions in translation for the first time.

In this regard she is in very good company as some of Japan’s most influential authors such as Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) and Ryunosuke Akutagawa have read and analysed Conan Doyle’s prose and adapted him or filleted him as only a highly skilled fan can do.

This type of creative blurring and “fan fiction” has been accentuated by multiple film adaptations. This also applies to Alice, who many in Japan have come across through the 1951 animated musical Disney adaptation and not the actual Alice books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.

 

• • Managing the Impossible

o much was changing in Japan that things that had seemed improbable, impossible or even unimaginable in the past must have started to feel like everyday occurrences. Changing the natural order of things that had developed over centuries must have been disorientating. Some thought control had been lost to Moriarty-like dark forces.

Japan had in a sense been socially conditioned by the long and peaceful Edo period (1603-1868) with its rigid hierarchies and Shogun-run state apparatus. These cultural and state institutions were in decay or at least in flux and Japan now found itself on the cusp of a feverish new era.

The Meiji Emperor (1852-1912), the figurehead of these new times, had announced that he and his family would begin eating beef and mutton. This was something that until then had been taboo and not part of Japanese establishment etiquette.

Western cookbooks and etiquette books were being published; new sports such as rugby, baseball and tennis were being played; and Japan was shifting from a country-focused inwards to an international power in its lead up to the Russo –Japanese War (1904-1905). A war in which Japan was the victor.

Some believe that this period, with its struggles and the challenge of fusing long-held traditions with modernity and conflicting imported new concepts, has shaped contemporary Japanese attitudes, inclinations and psychology more than any other period in Japanese history. More so than even Japan’s post-war occupation by Allied Forces.

Learning, coping with, and dreaming about the extraordinary adventure of modern life was for most ordinary Japanese people somewhat like Alice’s own adventures in Wonderland. It had become an essential life-skill.

Alice and Holmes, who both in their own ways pursue order and understanding, provided a lesson on how to deal with the impossible. And perhaps this goes some way in explaining their popularity.

Holmes famously says: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” and Alice also has an interesting dialogue on the topic:

“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

These two slightly eccentric and righteous individuals arrived in Japan during this pivotal period of profound political and cultural change leaving residual presences that have had a major influence. In this sense, Japan has acquired the rights to these two individuals not on a license or lease but on a freehold basis for perpetuity.

They are both now integral parts of Japanese culture even if the meaning and narratives of both Alice and Sherlock have morphed and been reshaped into different unique local forms and formats.

Today, Alice is now adored by many including Yayoi Kusama, probably Japan’s most famous contemporary artist known for her polka dot installations, and a very influential individual in her own right.

Kusama references Alice in her work and identifies with her personally and has created illustrations for a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has been described by critics as the perfect pairing.

Japan now even has Sherlock Bones, a manga about a crime-solving dog who can talk using a pipe belonging to his teenage owner’s grandfather, an English edition of which was published in 2013. And in 2018, following the success in Japan of the BBC’s series Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Miss Sherlock was released as a television series, an irreverent adaptation featuring a cello-playing high-heel wearing female detective, and a female doctor, Wato Tachibana, or as she is often referred to Wato-San.

 

Alice who some argue embodies the perfect young girl of the Meiji period, has shape-shifted effortlessly into a symbol of contemporary female freedom and adventure. She can seemingly be reinvented again and again in manga, anime and film for each new generation.

An excellent example of this is the 1980 Alice adaptation by Katsuhiro Otomo, best known for his 1988 post-apocalyptic animation Akira. His superb adaptation has helped to encourage many of Japan’s most creative artists to plunge down a similar creative passage of adaptation and interpretation for manga readers.

Otomo’s version contains a Mao-suited white rabbit and clever use of illustration size and graphic panels to depict the shrinking or enlarging promotions of the worlds Alice descends into as she leaves our physical reality.

But where did Sherlock Holmes disappear to between his apparent death after his fall at Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem and his dramatic reappearance three years later at 221B Baker Street, with a flask in his hand, in The Adventure of the Empty House?

Japan of course, according to Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Japan by Keisuke Matsuoka. An adventure that involves the Japanese Prime Minister Hirobumi Ito (1841-1909) and the English detective trying to acclimatise to 19^th century Japan in a very special case, published in Japanese in 2017 and in English in 2019.