http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bookban12jun12,1,495803
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DISPATCH FROM TOKYO
Once Shunned as Racist, Storybook Bestseller in Japan

'Little Black Sambo' was pulled from stores in 1988 for its blackface-
style drawings. Now, amid little protest, a reprint is a huge hit.

By Bruce Wallace
Times Staff Writer

June 12, 2005

TOKYO — A writer's death can do wonders for pushing that back catalog. Less
drastically, a few books acquire cachet by being banned.

Which may help explain why a reissue of "Little Black Sambo," a
turn-of-the-20th century illustrated children's book attacked as being
racist, is on the bestseller lists in Japan this spring.

The Japanese edition of "Sambo" was a big favorite here, from the time it
was introduced 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 heard in the West years earlier:
Sambo was a racist term for American blacks and illustrator Frank Dobias'
portrayal of the main character, with his bulging white eyes and
exaggerated, thick lips, was tantamount to a boy drawn in blackface.

In April, Zuiunsha, a small Tokyo publisher specializing in reprints, bet
that there was still a market for a book that had charmed generations of
Japanese youngsters who, as adults, were unable to find the book to read to
their own children.

The market proved him right. 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
bestsellers at major Tokyo book chains.

"Some people buy it out of nostalgia," said Tomio Inoue, Zuiunsha's
president, who gambled that he wouldn't face a backlash for breaking the
informal ban when he picked up the rights to the book. "Many readers didn't
know why it was out of print. They missed the book."

"Sambo" has returned to shelves with few objections in a country where
blacks remain extremely rare. One complaint has been published in an
English-language newspaper, written by an African American resident of
Japan. An online petition against the publisher garnered 263 signatures by
Saturday, most of them from non-Japanese, many from abroad.

That is a far cry from 1988, when a mainly American campaign drove the book
off Japanese shelves. The undoing was triggered by a report in the
Washington Post that noted 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.

The article spawned a letter-writing campaign in Japan from the Assn. to
Stop Racism Against Blacks, which was later discovered to be essentially a
one-family enterprise.

But it sparked a bigger backlash in Washington, where there were
accusations of entrenched racism against blacks among the Japanese and
protests were held at the Japanese Embassy and threats made to boycott its
cultural exports.

This was at a time when Japan, with 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 trade disputes with Washington, Japan's Foreign Ministry had a
word with the publishers, suggesting that 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 for the Winter Olympics and was
eager 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, Mori conducted academic experiments involving
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 drawings of the puppy, found himself a publisher,
and in 1997 released a "nonracist" version of the tale, titled "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 a year later. Written by Helen Bannerman, a Scot living
in India, it recounts the adventure of an Indian boy who encounters tigers
and bargains for his life by surrendering his fine clothes.

But the tigers, each with a different garment, fight over who is the
grandest among them, pursuing each other in frenzied circles until they
dissolve into pools of 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 says. "Sambo was small but
smart."

Bannerman did not retain the copyright to her work, which she had
illustrated herself, and in subsequent editions other artists were
commissioned, 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.)

After World War II, as the West became more racially sensitive, Bannerman's
book ran afoul of the NAACP and other campaigners who pointed out that
Sambo had been a racist epithet for blacks since the mid-18th century.

The book was banned in many U.S. schools, and by the 1960s had been chased
out of most libraries and gradually disappeared from bookstores. Recent
editions with different titles and illustrations are available online.

But a Sambo boom was on in postwar Japan. The prestigious Iwanami
Publishing Co. 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, the Iwanami version
became the most popular, reportedly selling as many as 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 with ballooning heads drawn 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.