Welcome to www.anneofjapan.com

OVERVIEW

When I was 16 years old, a friend of mine and I were walking down Queen Street in Charlottetown, just outside the Confederation Centre for the Arts, a large performing-arts complex best known for its staging every summer of the musical-theatre version of Prince Edward Island’s most recognisable cultural export “Anne of Green Gables”. We were stopped by a small group of Japanese tourists, who asked that I take a picture of them standing with my friend. Like lots of girls on Prince Edward Island, she had bright red hair.

Each summer Prince Edward Island has, since the 1980s, received tens of thousands of Japanese visitors, a lot for an island whose population already doubles each summer because of tourism. While the Japanese trend has been helpful to the tourist economy of Prince Edward Island, the cultural significance of the Japanese fondness for a tiny island on the east coast of Canada has been met primarily by bemused incomprehension on the part of its inhabitants, regarded as something akin to an invasion by a friendly group of space aliens, acceptable for the money it brings but essentially weird. It is clear that there is a reverence for the book “Anne of Green Gables” by Lucy Maud Montgomery on the part of Japanese visitors, as well as for the book’s multimedia cultural offshoots (films, TV shows, merchandise, cartoons), some of which have their origin in Japan. There are three film versions of “Anne of Green Gables” (1919, 1934, and 1940), not to mention the TV series of the 1990s and the Japanese cartoon version in 1979.

Nevertheless, the basis of the Japanese admiration remains unclear. Why do Japanese people, particularly young women, identify strongly with a culturally specific artefact such as a novel set on 19th-century Prince Edward Island? And why are they more familiar with, and often more articulate about, Prince Edward Island and its culture than many of the island’s inhabitants? These are among the questions asked by the documentary “Anne of Japan.”

Canada’s smallest province rates behind only New York, Paris, and London as the most sought after Japanese travel destination. The popularity of “Anne of Green Gables” in Japan is akin to other Western phenomena such as the Beatles and Audrey Hepburn, regarded as old news in their home countries, but eternally fresh in Japan. (To put some perspective on the degree of this popularity, Tokyo is a city where one can, if one feels like it, catch an Audrey Hepburn movie playing any day of the week in a cinema.)

Yoshiko Akamatsu writes in “L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture”: “Since the Japanese value silence, children were not allowed to talk in the presence of adults. The talkative Anne became a new heroine symbolizing the democratic after the war.” The role of women in Japanese society is a paradoxical one in that conformism is important, but a degree of eccentricity (or cuteness) is essential. There is a saying in Japanese culture: “The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.” Indeed, while renowned for her nonconformity, the loveable redheaded sparkplug ultimately submits to the demands of her loved ones.

The finished documentary will intertwine related narratives, told through interviews set in Prince Edward Island and Japan. It will begin with a wedding at the Anne of Green Gables museum in Park Corner, where many young Japanese couples decide to tie the knot. Ideally, we’ll follow the journey of one young couple in particular. They’ve planned their journey to Prince Edward Island, having chosen a travel/wedding package offered by their tourist agent, to get married on Prince Edward Island. We’ll ask them to explain their thoughts and feelings about why it was important for them to go to a place that is a magnet for tourists who believe it to be the actual home of a fictional character, who can have no home except in the imagination. The documentary will flash back in time, having seen this couple’s wedding at the beginning, to the point when they are planning it, discussing their feelings leading up to the event.

Interviews with young women, who read the Anne books as part of their early school curriculum, will form a large part of the interview segment of “Anne of Japan”. We will also follow a group who are taking one of the several English immersion courses, which are so popular among young Japanese women, probably the summer immersion program at the University of Prince Edward Island, organised by Dr. Clare Fawcett, also a renowned academic and expert on the cultural impact of Anne in Japan.

Another “character” will be that of a “young office lady”, the term in Japan for women who, having read “Anne of Green Gables” as schoolgirls, work in clerical jobs long enough to save money to accomplish their goal of going to Prince Edward Island. We’ll discover the reasons for her goal and how it affects her life, and if she is successful, we should see her make her journey.

The main narrative, the one that forms a backdrop to the others, will be a historical one, explaining the context of how “Anne of Green Gables” initially managed to occupy a special place in Japanese culture. This narrative will focus on the life of Hanako Muraoka: how she came to translate the book into Japanese in 1953, how it became immediately popular, how it entered the curriculum of the Japanese school system, how it became virtually a cult item to several generations of young Japanese women, resulting in its current ubiquitous popularity. This narrative will employ a great deal of historical footage and photography, accompanied by interviews with, among others, a representative of the publishing house Shincho-Sha in Tokyo, publishers of Hanako Muraoka’s original translation as well as of the multitude of subsequent books and spin-offs, as well as with Mie Miki, Hanako Muraoka’s granddaughter, who has helped to organise a museum dedicated to her grandmother, another hotspot on the itinerary of any Japanese fan of Anne’s. A certain attention must also be paid to the post-war context of the book’s arrival in Japan.

While half the film will be spent on Prince Edward Island, the remainder will be spent in several locations in Japan. From 1988 to 1998, the town of Ashibetsu, on the northern island of Hokkaido, was home to “Canadian World”, a theme park featuring recreations of Canadian wilderness scenes, and centred around a reconstruction of the house at Green Gables in Prince Edward Island and a pared-down version of the musical theatre piece which is staged each year at Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre of the Arts. The theme park was promoted as an affordable alternative for people who wanted to (but could not) make the journey to Prince Edward Island. Ashibetsu’s history closely mirrors that of Charlottetown, in that it has had to move from a resource-based economy (the coal mine shut down in the early 1980s) to an economy that emphasises tourism. The two cities are roughly the same size. Some commentary will be sought out from residents of Ashibetsu, to learn their opinions of tourism, their town’s past, and its future.

Another approach to understanding the resonance of the Anne mythology in Japanese culture may be traced through Lucy Maud Montgomery’s religious beliefs. She was an adherent to Theosophy, which was a fashionable, turn-of-the century, new-age spiritualist religion, endorsed by the artistic milieu of Europe and America. Sylvia DuVernet, author of the book Theosophical Thoughts Concerning Lucy Maude Montgomery, believes that Montgomery’s rhapsodic descriptions of Prince Edward Island landscape and 19th-century lifestyle ring a bell with the Japanese values of Shinto and Buddhism. This may be borne out in the documentary’s treatment of voice-over from the book of certain descriptions by Montgomery of nature scenes, read by a Japanese voice, with contrasting visuals.

It would be fruitful to interview any of the several Japanese academics, such as Yuko Katsura, Professor of Literature at Hiroshima University, who have brought Montgomery’s work into the canon of post-secondary study, sometimes to the chagrin of established literature departments, which view the books as frivolous.

It is apparent that there are many layers and approaches to understanding the cultural fascination for the Anne mythology in Japan. It’s my intent to outline that understanding with the documentary “Anne of Japan”.

The film’s aesthetic approach will be somewhat objective, with no explanatory voice-over or inter-titles explaining the topic, but instead relying on the words of the interview subjects to gradually elaborate the topic for the viewer. Visual emphasis will be, aside from the talking-head interview format, on basically formal landscape cinematography, the intent of which is to make uncertain for the viewer whether the landscape being viewed is that of Prince Edward Island or of Japan, depending on how it’s being discussed by the person being interviewed.

The filmmakers’ approach to the topic, by interviewing individuals and some experts about their personal feelings, is very emphatically not to mock their preoccupation with Anne. The tone will not be ironic. The goal of the film is to examine the complexity of cultural identity by showing that apparent foreigners can identify with aspects of our own culture (and vice versa) in a way that ought to confound if one subscribes to an essentialist notion of identity (ie. that Japanese people are a certain way, that women are a certain way, etc.). The emphasis of “Anne of Japan” will really be to interview Japanese people in Japan as well as on Prince Edward Island, and only about the topic of Anne of Green Gables. As such, it is not about the reconciliation of peoples’ fantasies with reality, but more about the origins of the fantasies themselves.