Japan Reads the Cotswolds: Children's Literature, Tourism, and the Japanese Imagination

Japan Reads the Cotswolds:Children's Literature, Tourism, and the Japanese Imagination Catherine Butler (bio) In the hot-spring town of Yufuin, on Japan's southern island of Kyushu, there is a small "British-style theme park" (Yufuin).1 Yufuin Floral Village, which opened for business in 2012, comprises a collection of shops, food stalls, and small-animal enclosures, each themed around a different figure from children's literature, film, or television (Fig. 1). Some of the texts drawn on are Japanese in origin, such as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki's Delivery Service (novel, 1985; film, 1989); others, like Heidi (1881) and Tove Jansson's Moomin books, are European but known in Japan largely through successful anime adaptations;2 Curious George (1939) and a Disney Princess shop constitute the American contribution. Despite this being a "British-style theme park," only a few of the shops are themed around British texts or characters, these being the classics, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), along with Aardman Animations' Shaun the Sheep (2007-18), a more recent hit in Japan. Nevertheless, Yufuin Floral Village is self-consciously Anglocentric in its presentation. A Mini with a Union-Jack motif is proudly displayed, there are cream teas for sale, and the main gift shop specializes in British-themed goods. Moreover, the Village's buildings, small and rustic in appearance, are modeled on those of the Cotswold hills in southern England, as the resort's website explains: "Yufuin Floral Village in Oita Prefecture is just like the world of Harry Potter. Yufuin Floral Village is a new amusement facility that recreates the townscape of the Cotswold region of Britain, which was also used as a location for Harry Potter" (Yufuin).3 The double reference to Harry Potter might lead one to expect a Harry Potter attraction or merchandise. In fact, Yufuin Floral Village boasts neither, although the website goes on to claim a resemblance between Harry Potter's owl, Hedwig, and the snowy owl pictured at the entrance to its "Owl Forest." The Cotswold connection is equally striking, and again the website doubles down on it, suggesting that Yufuin Floral Village is modeled on "what is called the world's most beautiful village, in the Cotswold region of the United Kingdom."4 Yufuin Floral Village conveniently combines a number of the tropes and striking juxtapositions with which this discussion will be concerned. [End Page 198] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. "The Rabbit," Yufuin Floral Village, Oita Prefecture. Photograph courtesy of the author. In particular, it illustrates the Japanese association of children's literature (of whatever provenance) with Britain, and specifically with the Cotswolds. That association is a complex one, the history and nature of which it is one purpose of this article to describe; but it also exemplifies a type of diffuse cultural interaction not easily captured by conventional critical approaches to the relationship of literature and place. Those approaches are by now well established. Critics working on literary tourism typically combine cultural geography with reception analysis, examining the interaction of readers and tourists with places seen as significant for specific authors and texts and discussing the ways in which their activities inflect literary experience (Watson, Literary Tourism; Booth). Literary tourism studies are strong on the emotional connections that attach to tourist sites, but they are limited by their focus on specific texts and places. By contrast, topoanalysis, a term proposed by Gaston Bachelard to denote the psychological study of "the sites of our intimate lives" (30), allows for the exploration of places and their affective qualities at a more general and archetypal level, as for example in Jane Suzanne Carroll's work on Susan Cooper and [End Page 199] J. R. R. Tolkien (Carroll, Landscape; Carroll, "Topoanalytical Reading"). Yet other critics (for example, Nikolajeva 121-52) have made productive use of the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope as a tool with which to investigate the indissoluble connection of space and time in the construction of fictional settings. Topoanalytical and chronotopical approaches, with their respective archetypal and intertextual emphases, escape some of the restrictions of literary tourism studies, although their capacity to articulate...