Bruce Wallace Los Angeles Times | Posted: Monday, June 13, 2005 12:00 am
TOKYO - A writer's death can do wonders for pushing that back catalog. Less drastically, a few books acquire cachet by getting banned.
Which may help explain why a reissue of "Little Black Sambo," a turn-of-the-20th century illustrated children's book with a reputation for racism, is back on the best-seller lists in Japan this spring.
"Sambo" was a big favorite of Japanese families from the time it was introduced here in 1953 until it was yanked from bookstores in 1988 after a swift and effective anti-racism campaign. The rap against it in Japan echoed that in the West years earlier: Sambo was a long-standing racist term for American blacks, and illustrator Frank Dobias' portrayal of the main character, with his bulging white eyes and exaggerated lips, was tantamount to a boy drawn in blackface.
In April, Zuiunsha, a small Tokyo publisher specializing in reprints, bet there was still a market for a book that had charmed generations of Japanese youngsters who, as adults, were now unable to find the book to read to their own children.
The market agreed. Zuiunsha reportedly has sold 95,000 copies in two months since bringing out "Chibikuro Sambo." Despite being a child's read at a thin 16 pages, "Sambo" sits among the top five adult fiction best sellers at major Tokyo book chains.
"Some people buy it out of nostalgia," explained Tomio Inoue, Zuiunsha's president, who in picking up the rights gambled he wouldn't face a backlash for breaking the informal ban. "Many readers didn't know why it was out of print. They missed the book."
So far, "Sambo" has returned to shelves with few objections in a country where blacks remain rare. There has been one complaint published in an English-language newspaper, written by a black resident in Japan. An online petition against the publisher garnered 262 signatures last week, most of them from non-Japanese, many from abroad.
That is a far cry from 1988, when a mostly American campaign drove the book off Japanese shelves. The undoing was triggered by a critical story in The Washington Post noting the popularity of a book "that most Americans thought had died a well-deserved death years ago," as well as several Sambo-related doll items on sale in Tokyo department stores.
It spawned a letter-writing campaign in Japan from The Association to Stop Racism Against Blacks, which was later revealed to be essentially a one-family enterprise. But it sparked a bigger backlash in Washington, where there were accusations of entrenched anti-black racism among the Japanese, resulting in protests at the Japanese Embassy and threats to boycott its cultural exports.
This was the pre-Saddam Hussein, pre-Osama bin Laden era, when Japan and its then go-go economy was perceived to be a threat to the United States. Fearing the book was adding a culture war to the pack of existing trade disputes with Washington, Japan's Foreign Ministry had a word with the publishers, suggesting a picture book and its spinoffs were not worth wider trouble.
Japanese publishers withdrew the book in less than a week. The dolls went too.
In Nagano City, the education board sent letters to every kindergarten asking parents to burn any copies of "Little Black Sambo" they might have at home. Of course, Nagano's civic leaders had their eyes on much more than a children's book. The city was then bidding to host a Winter Olympics and anxious to appear cosmopolitan.
"Nagano was very nervous about its reputation," said Kazuo Mori, an educational psychologist at Shinshu University in Nagano. "The reaction was to be overcautious."
But Mori said most Japanese were surprised to learn that "Little Black Sambo" had racist overtones. "It never occurred to us," he said. "It was just a story."
Intrigued by the controversy over the book, Mori conducted academic experiments on readers that he said showed the Japanese take nothing racist away from reading "Little Black Sambo."
He offered a group of kindergarteners and another of senior citizens a look at two versions of the story: one with the Dobias drawings, another with the central character drawn as a black Labrador puppy. The test groups found both illustrated versions equally amusing. Ergo, no racism, Mori concluded.
He then fine-tuned the test's drawings of the puppy, found himself a publisher, and in 1997 released a "non-racist" version of the tale as "Chikiburo Sampo."
That version has sold more than 50,000 copies.
"It's a sort of hit," he says with a laugh. "I bought a car."
The original "Little Black Sambo" was published in London in 1899 and in the United States. Written by Helen Bannerman, a Scot living in India, it recounts the adventure of a supposedly Indian boy who is stalked by tigers and bargains for his life by surrendering his fine clothes.
But the tigers fight over who is the grandest among them, pursuing each other in frenzied circles until they dissolve into butter.
To its defenders, Sambo is heroic and the story a harmless fantasy. "The little boy faces dangerous situations, but he manages to escape every time by his quick thinking," Japanese publisher Inoue maintains. "Sambo was small but smart."
As the West developed more racially sensitive antenna in the years after World War II, Bannerman's book ran afoul of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other campaigners who pointed out Sambo had been a racist epithet for blacks since the mid-18th century. Because Bannerman never retained the copyright to her work, other illustrators were commissioned for subsequent editions over the years, most portraying Sambo with the exaggerated lips and simpleton look that critics found cartoonish and derogatory. (It has never been definitively explained why artists opted for African characters to illustrate a story set in India.)
The book was banned in many American schools, and by the 1960s had been chased out of most libraries, gradually disappearing from bookstores as well.
But a Sambo boom was on in postwar Japan. The prestigious Iwanami Publishing Company issued a version of Bannerman's story, using Dobias' drawings that had been done in the 1920s for an American edition. Although there were as many as 40 other Japanese editions published, the Iwanami version became the Japanese standard, reportedly selling up to 1.2 million copies.
The Japanese read it at bedtime, and they read it at school. And the Dobias drawings were a hit in a country that loves animated characters with garish features, from the futuristic Pokemon crew to the stylized, frightening children drawn with ballooning heads by pop artist Yoshitomo Nara.
"The Japanese people can be racist when it comes to Koreans living here - it's well known," said psychologist Mori. "But racist against blacks?
"We have no experience in dealing with black people," he continued. "Where would we get it from?"
Special correspondent Naoko Nishiwaki contributed to this report.