Red Hair in a Global World: A Japanese History of Anne of Green Gables and Prince Edward Island

Michael B Pass

doi:10.32393/jlmms/2021.0009

Abstract

There is likely no version of Anne of Green Gables more mythologized than Muraoka Hanako’s 1952 Japanese translation, Akage no An. While many arguments have been offered to explain Anne’s Japanese success, this article moderates some of the more sensationalized while also situating the book within Japan’s wider cultural history.

Highlights

In the summer of 2019, Prince Edward Island played host to royalty
The princess had arrived to commemorate ninety years of diplomatic relations between Canada and Japan, Canada’s legation in Tokyo having officially opened on Canada Day, 1929.3 Over the following two days the princess took in a performance of Anne of Green Gables: The Musical at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, helped inaugurate the new Montgomery Park and Green Gables visitor centre in Cavendish, and later participated in a ceremony at the University of Prince Edward Island where, as patron of the L.M
That is a lesson we should all take to heart,” the princess remarked as she opened Montgomery Park

Summary

Introduction

In the summer of 2019, Prince Edward Island played host to royalty. On 27 August, Princess Takamado of the Japanese royal family flew into Charlottetown for the second time in fifteen years. As Taylor noted, while Kaifu’s audience “dutifully tittered” at his admonishment, Japan’s Anne “cult” was already “firmly rooted and blossoming.” As political scientist John Kirton wrote in 2008, the negative result of this single-minded “Anne of Green Gables vision” is that most Japanese will admire Canada for its “pristine natural environment, and abundant raw materials, but not as a pioneer in those areas that were expected to dominate the twenty-first century economy.” In the Japanese imagination, Prince Edward Island and Canada remain stuck in the (early) twentieth century as the rest of the world moves into the computer-driven “Asian Century” of the twenty-first

Conclusion

Works Cited