Avonlea as ‘world’: Japanese Anne of Green Gables tourism as embodied fandom

Abstract

This article explores Anne of Green Gables fandom in Japan, putting it into context with accounts of fandom as ‘subculture’ in contemporary Japanese cultural theory. Particular attention is paid to Okuda Miki's Akage no an no niwa de (In the Garden of Anne of Green Gables, 1995), a memoir of the months Okuda spent in early 1990s Canada inhabiting what she perceives as the ‘real’ setting of L.M. Montgomery's 1908 novel. This article examines how pilgrimages to Prince Edward Island emerge as an embodied fan practice in the 1980s and 1990s, and how the border-crossings instantiated through the rites and passages of Anne fandom – temporal, geographical, cultural – are imagined, negotiated and textually reproduced in writings like Okuda's. It also considers the theoretical implications of including this fandom in the purview of Japanese cultural theory, which usually bases analysis of subculture on anime and manga-based ‘otaku’ culture while treating Anne fandom as a part of a homogenously defined mass culture.