The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 27 (2016)
Copyright © 2016 Hisayo Ogushi. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Little House in the Far East:
The American Frontier Spirit andJapanese Girls’ Comics

Hisayo Ogushi*

Introduction
In 1975, an American country girl living with her affectionate family in
Walnut Grove, Minnesota, appeared on Japanese TV, captivating viewers in
the Far East. She was bright, independent, and sometimes rebellious, which
made her even more appealing. She heartily admired her strong, reliable
father as well as her beautiful, multitasking mother. She had an exemplary
older sister and a younger sister who was still a toddler. A watchdog named
Jack was her faithful companion. This pioneer girl was named Laura.
The TV series, Little House on the Prairie (1974–83), was originallyproduced by the American TV network NBC, and in Japan it was broadcast
by national public broadcaster NHK (Nihon Hoso Kyokai), where it ran
until 1982.1 Five of the nine Little House series of books written by Laura
Ingalls Wilder were translated into Japanese in the early 1970s. Thesebooks, along with the TV show, were sources of entertainment for Japaneseaudiences. The other four books—Little House in the Big Woods, Little
House on the Prairie, The Long Winter, and Little Town on the Prairie—were introduced much earlier, immediately after World War II, to the newly
democratized people of occupied Japan.
*Professor, Keio University

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In 1879, the actual Ingalls family left Walnut Grove, Minnesota, for the
Dakota Territory, where Laura’s father found work as a storekeeper andtimekeeper at the railroad camp.2 In By the Shores of Silver Lake, one of thebooks in the series, Laura and her family temporarily settle in a shanty.
While keeping her distance from the “rough men working on the grade andusing rough language” in the camp,3 Laura witnesses the construction of arailroad stretching farther west amid the “Great Dakota Boom.”4 When
construction is nearly finished and Laura’s relatives decide to move toMontana, she cannot contain her yearning to go farther west. However, hermother, Caroline, is reluctant to move any more, which reveals thedifferences among her family members with regard to pioneering.
“Why can’t we?” Laura said. “There’s all the money you’ve earned,
Pa; three hundred dollars. And we’ve got the team and wagon. Oh, Pa,
let’s go on west!”“Mercy, Laura!” Ma said. “Whatever—” She could not go on.
“I know, Little-Pint,” said Pa, and his voice was very kind.
“You and I want to fly like the birds. But long ago I promised your Mathat you girls should go to school. You can’t go to school and go west.
When this town is built there’ll be a school here. I’m going to get ahomestead, and you girls are going to school.”5
Laura understands she must go to school and become educated, eventhough she, like her father, is filled with anticipation and excitement that theidea of moving west inspires.
The following year (1880), the Ingalls family settled in De Smet, South
Dakota, farther west but east of Montana, as vividly described in These
Happy Golden Years. Here, Laura again mentions Caroline’s modest
objections when Charles expresses his desire to move farther west:“I would like to go west,” he [Pa] told Ma one day. “A fellow doesn’t
have room to breathe any more.”“Oh, Charles! No room, with all this great prairie around you?” Ma
said. “I was so tired of being dragged from pillar to post, and I thought
we were settled here.”6
These repeated conversations about settlement and mobility show thecontrast between Pa’s pioneering spirit and yearning for the West and Ma’s
unshakable determination to have their daughters receive a proper education.

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Caroline’s commitment to women’s education permeates the Little House
series. Laura is torn between the two: she shares Pa’s pioneering spirit, yet
she knows she must get an education and follow the example of her mother,
who was a schoolteacher before getting married.
The mother of the actual Caroline Ingalls, Charlotte Tucker, was from
Roxbury, Massachusetts. According to William T. Anderson, she graduatedfrom a female seminary in Boston.7 Interestingly, Charlotte, who was bornin 1809, was a contemporary of such nineteenth-century women writers as
Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Margaret Fuller, all ofwhom were from Massachusetts, as well as Caroline Kirkland, who hademigrated to Michigan from New York. These writers’ blunt comments
about the West resonate with Caroline’s reluctance to move farther west.
Meanwhile, Charles’s yearning for the frontier highlights the Edenic aspectof the uncivilized territories.
The “American West” has been a source of inspiration behind the idea of“America” since the last century, due in no small part to Frederick Jackson
Turner’s speech at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. In his essay “TheSignificance of the Frontier in American History,” which is based on thatspeech, Turner retrospectively constructs the idea of the West as an inevitablefeature of American identity. This idea can also be understood as a latervehicle for introducing democracy as part of an effort to “re-educate” a“lost” country of the Far East, Japan. The significance of America’s
reorientation strategy in occupied Japan after World War II has been widely
studied in the context of history, politics, literature, and cultural studies.8 In
this article, I argue for a possible cultural connection between nineteenthcentury American women writers and 1970s Japanese girls’ (shojo) culture
via the notion of an imagined West—or “mythic West,”9 as Richard White
calls it—which was introduced by American “soft power,” including the
Little House book and TV series.

I. Two Stories by Child: The Tragedy of the WestIn 1828, the Massachusetts writer Lydia Maria Child published her shortstory “Indian Wife,” a tragedy about a Native American woman who
commits suicide along with her young son after being abandoned by her
white husband.10 Eighteen years later, Child rewrote the story, with slightdifferences in detail, and retitled it “A Legend of the Falls of St. Anthony”(1846). In a setting near the well-known St. Anthony Falls in the Minnesota
Territory, Zah-gah-see-ga-quay, the daughter of the Sioux chief, marries a

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French fur trader against her father’s wishes. While her affection for the
Frenchman is sincere, he is only interested in ownership of the tribe’s land.
He takes their daughter, Felice, to Quebec and raises her as white. Zah-gahsee-ga-quay is left with her son, Florimond. When her husband returns after
several years, the poor woman, for fear of having her son taken away as
well, paddles her canoe carrying her son as well as herself into the Falls of
St. Anthony, praying they will go to the “spirit-land together,” where theFrenchman “cannot come . . . to separate” them.11
As indicated by Child’s revised title, the story is based on a legend,suggesting that Child might have been familiar with the folklore of theMinnesota Territory. Herbert Smith notes that an army explorer named
Stephen H. Long was among the first to relate the legend of the Falls of St.
Anthony, involving a Sioux woman named Anpetuzapawin.12 While it is notknown for certain when and how Child learned of this Sioux legend, her
two stories of a betrayed woman resonate with this tragedy of the West.
However, “Indian Wife” and “The Legend of the Falls of St. Anthony”
focus on different issues. Melissa Ryan argues that while the first version“focuses on land rights as a conflict between white and Indian, the 1846
version offers a story about gender rights that is ultimately a conflict
between man and woman.”13 If that is the case, then what is the reason forthe difference between the two stories?
Before we address this question, let us investigate how the West wasrepresented around the 1840s. Observing shifts in the representation of theAmerican wilderness in the Western regions, Teruhiko Mukai suggests thatthe wilderness was viewed as a dangerous and horrible realm thatsimultaneously offered fertility, natural beauty, and hope for the future.14 N.
P. Willis’s two-volume American Scenery (1840), with illustrations by W.
H. Bartlett, describes the sublime natural beauty of the wilderness as well as
the power of civilization in urban areas. As Mukai points out, Willis’s
optimistic perspective on the future is conveyed through the comparison of
the Old and New Worlds:
To compare the sublime of the Western Continent with the sublime of
Switzerland—the vales and rivers, and waterfalls, of the New World
with those of the Old—to note their differences, and admire orappreciate each by contrast with the other, was a privilege hitherto
confined to the far-wandering traveler.15
Beginning with Niagara Falls and ending with Faneuil Hall in Boston,Little House in the Far East

25

Willis shows that America contains wide-ranging beauty in both thewilderness and the city, which likely indicated to the newly independent
people what they were going to look for—that is, future.16 At the beginningof the book, Willis says, “He who journeys here, if he would not have theeternal succession of lovely natural objects . . . must feed his imagination on
the future. The American does so. His mind, as he tracks the broad rivers of
his own country, is perpetually reaching forward.”17
Willis’s hope for the future is clearly conveyed by the four stanzas hequotes from the poem “The Ages” (1821) by William Cullen Bryant.
Looking back at European history, Bryant romantically contrasts the senile,
corrupted Europe (”the Cities of the Dead”) with the youthful, developing
America (“youthful paradise”).18 One stanza quoted by Willis includes thefollowing lines: “Look now abroad—another race has fill’d / These populous
borders—wide the wood recedes, / And towns shoot up, and fertile realms
are till’d.”19 Bryant’s poem retrospectively redefines and reinforces theimage of America as Eden, inviting readers to anticipate the grand futurethat awaits them. Willis’s American Scenery celebrates civilization and thewilderness concurrently, which suggests the notion of “manifest destiny”
coined by John O’Sullivan in his 1845 article “Annexation” in the magazine
Democratic Review.20
Lydia Maria Child revised her 1828 story “Indian Wife” into a tale ofracial tragedy in the West, focusing on the gender issues of the time (1846).
The reason she wrote “The Legend of the Fall of St. Anthony,” I suggest,
was to express subtle opposition to the excessive optimism and hope for the
future attached to the western frontier, with its tendency to whitewash
problems of race and gender.

II. Demystifying the West: Margaret Fuller
Caroline Kirkland moved from New York to Detroit, Michigan, in 1835.
Her family headed farther west in Michigan, where her husband helped
found a village called Pinckney in 1837. In 1839, Kirkland published A New
Home—Who’ll Follow?: Or, Glimpses of Western Life, in which she
satirically describes the “literally true” lives of emigrants to the West.21 Her
acerbic commentary reveals the uncivilized and often revolting character ofdomestic life on the frontier, including unclean houses, the sudden
appearance of rattlesnakes, uneven roads, and uncomfortable inns. Kirkland
suggests that the reality of the West might prove disappointing for novice
settlers: “No settlers are so uncomfortable as those who, coming with

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abundant means as they suppose, to be comfortable, set out with adetermination to live as they have been accustomed to live. They soon findthat there are places where the ‘almighty dollar’ is almost powerless.”22 For
Kirkland, the West, far from being a pastoral realm of the future, is adangerous, rough, and undomesticated territory that presents settlers withcountless difficulties. Kirkland eventually returned East in 1843.
That same year, Margaret Fuller set out on a tour of the Great Lakes. Hertravelogue Summer on the Lakes (1844) recounts her experience, which
took her up to Michigan by way of Niagara Falls and Chicago. Interestingly,
Fuller works hard not to be overwhelmed by the sublime natural scenery.
Unlike N. P. Willis, who praises Niagara Falls as a “most imposing scene”
that arouses “his fullest admiration and astonishment,”23 Fuller consciously
maintains a certain distance from Nature: “Yet I, like others, have little tosay where the spectacle is, for once, great enough to fill the whole life, andsupersede thought, giving us only its own presence. ‘It is good to be here,’is the best as the simplest expression that occurs to the mind.”24 Having seen
photos in the past of this famous sightseeing spot, Fuller wryly confesses
that when she witnesses the actual site, she cannot resist comparing it with
its visual representations. For Fuller, Nature is a place humans should not
encroach upon without good reason; even though she feels “genuine
admiration,”25 she is not arrogant enough to think she can immediately
thrust herself into the harmony of Nature: “It was only after a daily andcareless familiarity that I entered into its beauty, for nature always refuses
to be seen by being stared at.”26 The undertone of Fuller’s perspective on theWest is that there is always already a distance between humans and Naturethat should be respected.
Fuller’s distant attitude toward the West reveals her denial of the West as
Edenic. She is honest about her prejudice against the West and the slogan
used to promote westward movement: “I come to the west prepared for the
distastes I must experience as its mushroom growth. I know that where ‘goahead’ is the only motto, the village cannot grow into the gentle proportion
that successive lives, and the gradations of experience involuntarily give.”27
Indeed, Fuller refuses to “confound ugliness with beauty, discord withharmony,” and although the West sometimes wins her accolades, herskepticism is ubiquitous throughout the travelogue. The severity of life in
the West deprives the emigrants of sufficient time for valuable consideration:“There is nothing real in the freedom of thought at the West, it is from theposition of men’s lives, not the states of their minds.”28
Gender issues also arise in Summer on the Lakes, which was published aLittle House in the Far East

27

year before her monumental feminist work, Woman in the NineteenthCentury (1845). According to Fuller, a serious problem with the West is thatwomen are not accommodated there because it is not their choice to go
there: “It has generally been the choice of the men, and the women follow,
as women will, doing their best for affection’s sake, but too often inheartsickness and weariness.”29 Having seen emigrants from New Englandin the West with their “habits of calculation” and proclivities toward greed
and vulgarity, Fuller characterizes the West as a depraved place.
It should be mentioned, however, that Fuller does not deny that women
have flexibility in the West. Her concern is that East Coast women cannot
adapt to the environment of the West because they cling to old traditions
that do not fit with the still rough society:
Seeing much of this joylessness, and inaptitude, both of body andmind, for a lot which would be full of blessings for those prepared forit, we could not but look with deep interest on the little girls, and hope
they would grow up with the strength of body, dexterity, simple tastes,and resources that would fit them to enjoy and refine the western
farmer’s life.30
It is noteworthy that, despite her unfavorable observations of theenvironment, Fuller hopes little girls will grow to appreciate where they live
and produce “original growth.”31 “The Spirit of imitation” and “reference toEuropean standards” are what Fuller cautions against in the West;32 sheworries that mimicry will spoil the energy of little girls, who otherwise
would be strong enough to enjoy their own lives in the West. Fuller
impressively emphasizes the need for good schools “planned by persons ofsufficient thought to meet the wants of the place and time, instead of copying
New York or Boston.”33 Thus, while the future author of Woman in the
Nineteenth Century rejected the pastoral image of the West as a dream-filledplace, she recognized the potential to engender a new, original type of young
girl there. Fuller, recognizing the difficulties those women face, demystifies
the West in the midst of westward expansion while also placing trust in the
girls born there with a western mindset.

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III. The Declaration of Independence in the Wilderness:
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Published a year after Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, John O’Sullivan’s“Annexation” (1845) demonstrated to Americans how western expansion,by insisting on the legitimacy of US authority over Texas and California,
fulfilled the “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by
Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”34
Accordingly, railroad construction expanded to the West. In June 1854,
Catharine Maria Sedgwick was invited to the opening ceremony of the
Chicago and Rock Island Railway, a line connecting Chicago and theMississippi River. “The 1854 Grand Excursion,” joined by eastern celebrities
ran from Chicago Station to Rock Island, Illinois, where the tourists took asteamship to the Falls of St. Anthony in the Minnesota Territory.
After returning East, Sedgwick wrote an article for Putnam’s Monthly
Magazine called “Great Excursion to the Falls of St. Anthony: A Letter toCharles Butler, Esq., by One of the Excursionists.” Sedgwick sincerely
praised the tour as “an illustration and proof of the advancement of true
civilization,”35 though her reference to “true civilization” is not as transparent
as it seems. Emphasizing the “inevitable and indissoluble Union” of the“Free West to the East” by the railroad,36 Sedgwick vigorously celebrates
the beauty of the West and America’s possession of it: “Their guests wereinvited not to admire their state, or to envy or covet their wealth, but tosee—most of us for the first time—the inappreciable riches and untold
beauty of our own country—our own inalienable possessions.”37 She
reiterates that the railroad represents “union” and “brotherhood,”38 aconnector between the Atlantic and the Pacific, which reconfirms that thevast spread between the coasts is the “land of promise prepared for them[settlers] by the universal Father.”39 Sedgwick even introduces the
Declaration of Independence as if to legitimize O’Sullivan’s manifest
destiny by using the authentic document containing the “glorious truth
announced 79 years ago, and not yet quite digested.”40
She continues, quoting the Declaration of Independence with a minor
alteration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident:—that all men are createdfree and equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights; that among these are liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”41 It isquite likely that Sedgwick was aware of the contemporary political situationin Kansas and Nebraska. Peterson and Roise note that the Great Excursion
was conducted right after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May 1854,

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which allowed for popular sovereignty over the issue of slavery andforegrounded the confrontation between slave states and free states.42 The“unity” rhetoric Sedgwick uses in the article thus implies an ironic reference
to the current division between North and South while extolling thewonderful union between East and West.
We should remember, however, that the Declaration of Independence is amonumental document that insists on a right of “separation.” How does
Sedgwick reconcile the notions of separation and unity in the rhetoric ofindependence? Why does she add alterations to the Declaration such as“free and equal”?
I believe that the reflecting men and women of our excursion party felt,
as they never felt before, the great mission of their children and theirneighbors who are going West. And are they not all going to the West?
Was there not something prophetic in the exulting shout that broke
forth, the hurras and the waving of hats, when our party, in their arrowlike progress, first caught sight of the Mississippi?43
Here, Sedgwick again reminds us of the significance of westward
movement and the hope for a bright future, while subtly inserting “men andwomen” to describe the tourists. It is likely that Sedgwick was thinking ofanother well-known declaration issued in 1848, the Declaration of
Sentiments. Written and delivered by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca
Falls, New York, at the first women’s rights convention, this declaration of
women’s independence clarifies that “all men and women are createdequal,”44 making a small but important alteration to “all men are createdequal.” Sedgwick, a mere sojourner from the East, possibly saw the West asa place where women’s separation from men, as well as equality with them,might be achieved.
Sedgwick confesses that if she were asked to live in the West, she would“answer without hesitation, no! . . . Let the young go. They should.”45
Likewise, Sedgwick only provides brief commentary on the natural sceneryon the way to the Falls of St. Anthony, reminiscent of Fuller’s attempt tomaintain distance from the sublimity of Nature. Western scenery, for
Sedgwick, is a mimicry of the picturesque Old World: “Midway up the
bluff, you sometimes see a belt of rock, reminding one of the fragments of
Roman walls on the Rhine. . . . These mere rocks of lime and sandstone somock and haunt you with their resemblance to the feudal fortresses of the
Old World.”46 She does not express excitement over the sublime scenery in30

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which N. P. Willis identified Americanness. Honoring “true civilization,”
Sedgwick expects future generations to cultivate the soil for equality.

IV. Picturesque America and the Mythic West
Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 in Wisconsin in the midst of
westward expansion. Her mother, Caroline, was also born in Wisconsin,but, as mentioned, Caroline’s mother, Charlotte Tucker, was from
Massachusetts.47 Tucker moved west with her Connecticut-born husband
Henry Quiner, who drowned in Lake Michigan.48 With her New Englandroots, Wilder might have inherited her mother’s eastern sensibility—thekind Fuller asserts in Summer on the Lakes. In her autobiographical works,
Wilder fashions Laura as the kind of independent frontier girl Fuller andSedgwick would have appreciated as the girl of the future.
As westward expansion continued throughout the latter half of thenineteenth century, its representation was remystified through visual
representations and popular culture. In 1872, the poet William Cullen
Bryant edited the first volume of Picturesque America; or, the Land We LiveIn, a book containing illustrations of natural scenery. In the preface, Bryant
highlights the newness and unity of the United States: “A rapid journey by
railway over the plains that stretch westward from the Mississippi, brings
the tourist into a region of the Rocky Mountains rivaling Switzerland in its
scenery of rock piled on rock, up to the region of the clouds. But Switzerland
has no such groves on its mountain sides.”49 Both N. P. Willis and Bryant
evoke rivalry with Switzerland as they try to differentiate America’s natural
beauty from that of Europe and emphasize the uniqueness of the American
sublime. The West thus became established as a symbol of Americanness.
The dime novel was another vehicle for remystifying the West. From thetime of the first appearance of “story papers” (weekly newsprint periodicals
with illustrated stories) in the 1830s, popular fiction was widely circulated
throughout the century. As Michael Denning notes, “these papers, which
had circulation in the hundreds of thousands, were aimed at the entire
family, containing a carefully-balanced mixture of serialized adventurestories, domestic romances, western tales, and historical romances.”50
Among these popular fiction publications, the Beadle’s Dime Novels series,
established in 1860, gained huge popularity. According to Denning, thepublisher printed four million dime novels during its first five years, andsales of each title ranged from 35,000 to 80,000 copies.51 Beadle’s Dime
Novels focused especially on westerns and pioneer adventure stories,

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drawing on the lineage of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking
Tales.52
The ultimate remystification of the West occurred in 1893, three years
after the census of 1890 proclaimed the disappearance of the frontier line.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s speech and essay “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History” retrospectively explained the meaning of thefrontier and its cultural and social effects on the American mind. “Thisperennial rebirth,” Turner stated, “this fluidity of American life, thisexpansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch withthe simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American
character.”53 As it moved westward, the frontier became increasingly
Americanized, producing individualism and democracy.54 Turner delivered
his frontier theory to the American Historical Association in Chicago during
the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show
attracted as many as 18,000 people.55 The same year, Thomas Edison
founded the film production laboratory Black Maria, which produced
western-themed short films, including Buffalo Bill and Bucking Broncho.56
The multilayered imagery of the West depicted by antebellum female
writers such as Child, Kirkland, Fuller, and Sedgwick was simplified andremystified via an optimistic American exceptionalism that held sway at theturn of the century. The American West was now an export product ofAmerican culture. As Emily S. Rosenberg notes, “The cowboy exemplified
popular values,” and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, attracting popularity
among foreign audiences when it toured Europe, “demonstrated that theAmerican Western formula had universal appeal.”57 The Turnerian frontier
had thus become a cultural and political bullet to propagate American
ideology (including Japan, discussed in section 5).
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series began with the 1932 publicationof Little House in the Big Woods. She then successively wrote and published
Farmer Boy (1933), Little House on the Prairie (1935), On the Banks ofPlum Creek (1937), By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939), The Long Winter(1940), Little Town on the Prairie (1941), and These Happy Golden Years(1943). Although she began her writing carrier in 1911 as a columnist for a
local Missouri newspaper, it was the Little House series for young girls thatbrought her national fame.
As Anita Clair Fellman argues in Little House, Long Shadow, Wilder’sversion of the frontier fits with Turner’s frontier theory: “The version in
their [Wilder’s and Turner’s] books bears many points of resemblance toTurner’s frontier thesis, as modified by their gender, but their conclusions

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were not necessarily his.”58 Wilder’s belief in self-reliance, Fellman
suggests, can be viewed as a modification of Turner’s male-centered frontier
theory, though it is uncertain whether Wilder ever read “The Significance of
the Frontier in American History.” However, the fact that Turner (b. 1861)
and Wilder (b. 1867) were both from Wisconsin offers a plausible explanation
for their congruous views of the frontier.59 Published during the era of theGreat Depression and World War II, the Little House series can be clearlyseen as encouraging readers to reconfirm America’s foundational principles:
individualism, self-sufficiency, freedom, and democracy.
Wilder’s frontier does not, however, merge completely with the simple,
optimistic myth of the West. In this regard, Wilder as a novelist contributes
to the tradition of American women’s literature, possibly comparable toChild, Fuller, or Sedgwick. What is most impressive throughout the Little
House book series is how Laura fashions herself as a self-made woman. In
The Little Town on Prairie (1941), shortly after she hears the Declaration of
Independence and the song “America” during a celebration in De Smet, a
new idea occurs to her:
The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still.
Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and thesong came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s
king.
She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans
are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No kingbosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little
older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone
else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be
good.
Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This iswhat it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’sGod, author of liberty—” The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God
endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep thelaws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be
free.60
Laura’s strong affirmation here reveals her understanding of the
Declaration as giving her license to obey and pursue her own will. Since noone else can give her orders, she must “make herself be good,” which might
imply her unstated desire to make herself a “god.”

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The pioneer girl Wilder creates (based on her own life) is much like theone Fuller anticipates in Summer on the Lakes, a girl “with the strength ofbody, dexterity, simple tastes, and resources that would fit [her] to enjoy andrefine the western farmer’s life.” Wilder skillfully distinguishes Laura, awestern pioneer girl, from her mother Caroline and her sister Mary, both ofwhom embody the genteel eastern standard for women, while the younger
Carrie and the last-born Grace are depicted as the ones who need Laura’s
protection. The Little House series, inheriting the dual traditions of themythic West and female literary genealogy, supports the American cultural
expansion that occurred during the latter half of the twentieth century.

V. Laura in the Japanese Context:
The Pioneer Girl in Shojo Manga
If Rosenberg’s argument that “the American Western formula had
universal appeal” is correct, it is no surprise that Japanese people enjoyedwestern movies, even before World War II. These visualizations of an
exoticized, sublime West were eventually exported to areas outside theUnited States, including Japan, and the West thus became a symbol of theUnited States. Westerns were introduced to Japanese audiences as early as
1924, when The Covered Wagon, directed by James Cruz, was released inJapan (fig. 1).61 As Jane Tompkins suggests in West of Everything, theFigure 1. Kinema Jumpo no. 150 (1924), 10–11. National Diet Library.

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western genre is usually understood as a masculine world that excludes
female discourse and language.62 After World War II, however, Japanesereaders discovered The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder that, like theworks of Fuller and Sedgwick, shed light on western life through the eyesof a young girl.
After World War II, Japan was governed by the US General Headquarters/
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), which initiatedthe country’s democratization process. In 1946, the United States Education
Mission visited Japan to help improve Japanese education. The mission’sreport states, “Our greatest hope, however, is in the children. Sustaining as
they do, the weight of the future, they must not be pressed down by theheritage of a heavy past. . . . We are not devoted to uniformity; as educators
we are constantly alert to deviation, originality, and spontaneity. That is thespirit of democracy.”63 The report frequently mentions the ultimate goal ofa democratized Japan, which is to respect each student as an individual andaccept differences among learners. From 1945 to 1952, occupied Japan, asa new frontier, was to be cultivated by Westerners. During this time, allmedia were censored by the GHQ/SCAP under the “democratic” policy.
In Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century, Susan Smulyan
analyzes the GHQ/SCAP’s strategy for teaching democracy throughAmerican films. Employing the umbrella term “democracy” to cover themultilayered ideologies in these movies, the GHQ/SCAP used American
films to “reorient” Japanese society. Because ideological stability is
intractable, especially in popular culture, Smulyan notes, they [theOccupation authorities] saw films as uncomplicated propaganda promoting
the American way of life, and yet they failed in their attempt to use movies
as simple ideological instruments.”64 In this way, the American films,
originally intended to indoctrinate the Japanese public with American
values, created a space for escapism.65 This simultaneous consumption ofideology and escapism in occupied Japan can be understood as a reiterationof the turn-of-the-century remystification of the American West, while once
more using it as a way to promote “democracy.”
Westerns, however, were not highly recommended by the US Civil
Information and Education Section (CIE). This was because westerns
inevitably contain undesirable characteristics such as violence, vengeance,and racism, to name a few. Although Japanese audiences enthusiasticallywelcomed the revival of westerns, the GHQ/SCAP was concerned about theeffects such movies might have on their audiences.66 The increasing number
of westerns released in occupied Japan showed, however, that their

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popularity could not be ignored. According to Hiroshi Kitamura, while only
three westerns were released in Japan in 1946, forty-four were released in
1951,67 including Tall in the Saddle (1944; released in Japan in 1946), High,
Wide and Handsome (1937; first released in Japan in 1937, revived in 1946),
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945; released in Japan in 1946), Union
Pacific (1939; first released in Japan in 1940, revived in 1947), and Boom
Town (1940; released in Japan in 1947).68 In addition to movies, reorientationof Japanese values was conducted using printed materials. To accomplish
the democratization of Japan, the textbook selection committee decided tosend US textbooks to Japanese educational institutions. American education
libraries were established in eleven major Japanese universities.69
Such education in democracy through written materials was also
promoted by the SCAP translation program (1948–51), a bidding system forJapanese publishers to acquire the translation rights to foreign books
exclusively selected by the CIE. The front page of the May 26, 1948, issueof Nippon Dokusho Shimbun reported on the bidding system, providing thetitles of one hundred books to be translated, adding the slightly ironiccomment, “The selected titles do not necessarily contain literary merit orexcellent entertainment, for most of them are the choices of the CIE. Rather,
they were selected for their usefulness in supporting Japanese people infulfilling their duties under the Potsdam Declaration.”70 Among the one
hundred titles to be translated was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter,
which was published in two volumes in 1949.
Not all of the auctioned books were translated and published. The
translation was supposed to be completed within four months of winningthe contract, and the book was supposed to be published within six months.71
Three of Wilder’s books managed to get translated and published throughthe SCAP program (The Long Winter in 1949; Little House in the Big Woods
and Little House on the Prairie in 1950). In a preface to The Long Winterwritten exclusively for Japanese audiences, Wilder warmly suggested thateven though we speak different languages, we should share the things thatare truly valuable—namely, being honest, making full use of what we are
given, finding happiness in the small things in everyday life, being cheerfulwhen we suffer, and having courage in the face of danger.72 It is no wonderthat The Long Winter, in which the Ingalls family endures an unexpectedly
long and painful winter in an isolated town, was introduced first before
earlier titles of her series. With its story of suffering and survival, the bookmight have resonated with Japanese readers following defeat in the war.
Thus, it can be said that democratic education for the Japanese was partly

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achieved through Wilder’s western novels.
That said, it would be hasty to conclude that The Long Winter had an
immediate influence on Japanese children in occupied Japan. Researching
the supposed popularity of The Long Winter, Nami Hattori has not yet founda second printing, despite an advertisement from the publisher on the second
volume that a second printing of the first volume was forthcoming.73 Moreinformation and data are needed to analyze Japanese acceptance of the threebooks from the Little House series after World War II. We can at least say,however, that these early translations of Wilder’s books sowed the seeds ofAmerican western idealism, which would later become evident in Japanese
girls’ shojo culture.
At the same time, during the 1950s and 1960s, various American TV
shows were broadcast in Japan. The first foreign TV drama broadcast inJapan was Cowboy G-Men (April–October 1956). After that, Japaneseviewers were entertained by a succession of TV western series: The Cisco
Kid (1956–57), The Lone Ranger (1958–62), Rawhide (1959–65), Cheyenne(1960–61), Laramie (1960–63), and The Big Valley (1965–67), among
others.74 In 1975, a few years after the translations of Farmer Boy, On the
Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, and These Happy Golden
Years appeared in print, the TV series Little House on the Prairie started to
be broadcast by NHK, Japan’s only public broadcaster.
During the 1970s and 1980s, girls’ culture, often called kawaii (cute)culture, flourished in Japan. With girls’ preference for American countryliving styles, it can be argued that the Little House series, along with Anneof Green Gables,75 had a significant impact on kawaii culture. There havebeen numerous “fancy goods” for girls, including American characters like
Holly Hobbie—a girl wearing a big bonnet and quilted apron—and original
Japanese characters such as Tiny-Candy (fig. 2). These characters, alongwith Laura from the TV show and otome-tick (girlie) comics, offered girls
opportunities to be familiar with an American way of living. In the mid1970s, summer resorts in highland areas of Japan such as Hara-mura andKiyosato started building villages with small country-style inns and B &Bs, attracting visitors from all over Japan.76 In the early 1980s, the legendary
store Depot 39 appeared in Jiyugaoka, selling country-style merchandise
imported directly from the United States.
Western and country styles thus merged with Japanese girls’ culture,including the genre of shojo manga. In 1979, the famous manga writer
Yumiko Igarashi launched the first installment of Maimee Angel in the
popular girls’ comics magazine Nakayoshi. Maimee Warren is an American

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37

Figure 2. A “fancy” Holly Hobbie desk lamp from 1974, author’s collection.

girl living in a town called Spring City with her mother and two sisters (fig.
3). Her father, who had longed to move west, died before the story begins.
Maimee’s cousin Alman (similar to Almanzo) lives in a town in Wyoming
called Red Rock Fields, and Maimee’s family decides to move to farther
West to follow the deceased father’s dream. Maimee has another purpose ofher own: to find a boy named Johnny, her childhood sweetheart whom she
had promised to marry. The Warren family joins a covered wagon caravan
in Independence City headed for Oregon via the “Orange Road.” On theway to Oregon, Maimee learns that Alman’s parents were killed by a vicious
ranch owner, Mr. Dalton, in Red Rock Fields and that Johnny’s father was
also lynched. Now, Johnny seeks an opportunity for vengeance.
Mixing elements of the Little House series and western movies withrevenge plots, Maimee Angel foregrounds a pioneer girl with an independent
spirit and feminine agency. During the time when otome-tick manga, whichmostly focus on the everyday lives of ordinary girls, was at the height of its
popularity, Maimee Angel presented a girl who followed her own conscience.
In the middle of their westward travels, Maimee’s mother and sisters decideto go back to Spring City because of the mother’s illness. Maimee,
remembering Johnny and Alman, who are supposed to wait for her in theWest, returns to the caravan alone: “I don’t want to see a rich man or a
gentleman in the East! The place I’ll go is. . . . The West is the only place I

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Hisayo Ogushi

Figure 3. Yumiko Igarashi, Maimee Angelshould go! I’m not going back to Spring City! Beverly, Jodi, Mom, I’msorry, I’m going back to the caravan!”77
Maimee is not a female character who is always inside cabins or covered
wagons. She trusts her own decisions and goes where she thinks she needs
to go. She thinks and acts in the wilderness. In manga fiction, girls can doanything, and they show us just how much they can accomplish in a world
traditionally reserved for men. Maimee even fires a gun to help Johnny,whom she finds after her long journey west (fig. 4). Set in a gaikoku (foreigncountry), Maimee Angel builds a fictional world of unfettered imaginationin the wilderness. Maimee offers the audience a simulated pioneer
experience, helping them to escape from their everyday school lives, inwhich girls are often compelled to behave according to prescribed genderroles.

Conclusion
Yumiko Igarashi expresses her affection for western movies in the preface

Little House in the Far East

39

Figur4. Yumiko Igarashi, Maimee Angelto Maimee Angel: “I was a big fan of the movie Shane. I saw it when I wasin ninth grade. Since then, I have frequently watched western movies andTV shows and was so impressed with their frontier spirit. The dream ofgoing west represents the conflict between Nature and us, as well as ourinner struggle to make our dreams come true.”78 Though she does not
mention the Little House series, it is reasonable to assume she was aware ofeither the TV show or the books. Maimee Angel ends with the happy reunionof Maimee and Johnny, following the romantic love formula of shojo
manga. Nevertheless, this work also inherits the discourse of the mythic
West in popular culture. Throughout 1979, Nakayoshi sold about 1,800,000
copies a month,79 distributing a fantasy and a realm of escape to girls allover Japan.80
Nineteenth-century women writers such as Child, Kirkland, Fuller, andSedgwick provided a female perspective on the West that included negativeand ironic twists. Yet, they also anticipated a new girl who could survive lifein the wilderness. They must have had no idea how far the West would
expand.

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Hisayo Ogushi

Frederick Jackson Turner described a “perennial rebirth” of American
life on the frontier line.81 Thus, the West extended to the Far East, where it
was reborn in Japanese shojo culture via the Little House series and thedemocratization policy. This need not be regarded as the Americanization of
shojo culture or the American domination of Japanese popular culture.
Rather, shojo manga discovered an unrestricted realm for Japanese girls —the mythic West—and expanded into areas that girls had yet to reach.

Notes
This article is partially based on papers I delivered at the workshop on
Manifest Destiny at Seikei University, November 13, 2014, and at
LauraPalooza 2015 at South Dakota State University, July 18, 2015.
1 In Japan, seasons 1 through 8 were broadcast from 1975 to 1982, and season 9 wasreleased in 1991. According to an article on NHK’s website (”Akai san nooto” [Mr.
Akai’s notebook), the purchasing manager of NHK was very impressed with its
representations of family affection and humanity, the prairie (which Japan does nothave), and the attractive casting, so he strongly recommended the show at the meeting in
1974. http://www.nhk.or.jp/archives-blog/sp/genre/drama/84157.html.
2 Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela
Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 151–52.
3 Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, rev. ed. (1939; repr., New York:
Harper, 1971), 76.
4 South Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, South Dakota’s Railroads, 16–18,
http://history.sd.gov/Preservation/OtherServices/SDRailroad.pdf.
5 Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 126.
6 Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, rev. ed. (1943, repr., New York:
Harper, 1971), 138.
7 William T. Anderson, “The Literary Apprenticeship of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” South
Dakota History 13, no. 4 (1984): 285–331.
8 See, e.g., Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007); Susan Sumulyan, Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Hiromi Ochi, “Democratic
Bookshelf,” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, ed. Catherine
Turner (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 89–111; and Noriko Suzuki,“Ekkyo suru seibu: GHQ nihon minsyukaseisaku to amerika bungaku [The transgressing
West: GHQ’s democratization policy for occupied Japan and American literature],” inReisen to Amerika [The Cold War and America], ed. Akira Murakami (Kyoto: Rinsen-

Little House in the Far East

41

Shobo, 2014), 23–52.
9 Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of theAmerican West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), Kindle edition, chap.
21.
10 Lydia Maria Child, “Indian Wife,” in The Coronal (Boston: Carter, 1831), 162–80.
11 Lydia Maria Child, “The Falls of St. Anthony,” in Hobomok and Other Writings on
Indians (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 211.
12 Herbert G. Smith, “The Winona Legend,” Minnesota History Magazine 13, no. 4(1932): 367–76. Smith asserts that Long was “the first to relate the story of Black Day
Woman [Anpetuzapawin] and the Falls of St. Anthony” (367), leading to various literaryworks in which the legend appeared throughout the nineteenth century (367–68).
13 Melissa Ryan, “Republican Mothers and Indian Wives: Lydia Maria Child’s Indian
Stories,” ESQ 56, no. 1 (2010): 58.
14 Teruhiko Mukai, Amerikan uirudanesu no shoso [On several aspects of the American
wilderness] (Tokyo: Eihosha, 2000), 17.
15 N. P. Willis, American Scenery, vol. 1 (London: George Virtue, 1840), iii.
16 Mukai, Amerikan uirudanesu no shoso, 20.
17 Willis, American Scenery, 2.
18 William Cullen Bryant, “The Ages,” in The Poetical Works of William Cullen BryantVol. 1, ed. Parke Godwin (New York: Appleton, 1883), 58, 65.
19 Qtd. in Willis, American Scenery, 3.
20 John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (1845), 5.
21 Caroline Kirkland, New Home—Who’ll follow?: Or, Glimpses of Western Life
(Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, n. d.) Kindle edition, preface.
22 Kirkland, New Home, chap. 14.
23 Willis, American Scenery, 4.
24 Margaret Fuller, “Summer on the Lakes,” in The Essential Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steel(New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1992), 71.
25 Ibid., 77.
26 Ibid., 85.
27 Ibid., 86.
28 Ibid., 80.
29 Ibid., 106.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.,107.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” 5.
35 Catharine Sedgwick, “Great Excursion to the Falls of St. Anthony: A Letter to42

Hisayo Ogushi

Charles Butler, Esq., by One of the Excursionists,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 9(September 1854), 320.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 321.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Peterson, Penny, and Charlene K. Roise, “Merrily over the Prairie: The Grand
Excursion Ventures to Saint Anthony Falls (Minneapolis: Community Planning andEconomic Development, City of Minneapolis, 2004), 2.
43 Sedgwick, 321.
44 “Declaration of Sentiments,” in American Literature: A Prentice Hall Anthology,
vol. 1 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 1733.
45 Sedgwick, 325.
46 Ibid.
47 In Little House in the Big Woods (1932), Wilder mentions that Caroline bakes
Johnnycake, a New England dish made of corn. See Wilder, Little House in the Big
Woods, rev. ed. (1932, repr., New York: Harper, 1971), 226.
48 John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 17.
49 William Cullen Bryant, Picturesque America; or, the Land We Live In, vol. 1 (NewYork: Appleton, 1872), iii.
50 Michael Denning, “The Figure of the Dime Novel in American Culture,” in Popular
Culture in American History, ed. Jim Cullen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 83.
51 Ibid.
52 Henry Nash Smith, The Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950;
repr.: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 92. Shunsuke Kamei, Sakasu ga
kita! [The circus is come!] (1976; repr., Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013), 182–90.
53 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; repr., New York:
Penguin, 2008), 2.
54 Ibid., 4, 30.
55 Martin J. Manning and Clearance R. Wyatt, eds., Encyclopedia of Media andPropaganda in Wartime America, vol. 1 (New York: ABC-Clio, 2011), 233.
56 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison
Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 50.
57 Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic andCultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 35.
58 Anita Clair Fellman, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on

Little House in the Far East

43

American Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 70.
59 Ibid., 71.
60 Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, rev. ed. (1941, repr. New York:
Harper, 1971), 75–76.
61 The Covered Wagon (1923, released in Japan in 1924) was selected as the mostentertaining movie of 1924 by Kinema Jumpo, the oldest Japanese film journal. Other
western movies released in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s include 3 Bad Men (1926,
released in Japan in 1927), The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936, released in Japan in1936), The Plainsman (1936, released in Japan in 1937), Stagecoach (1939, released inJapan in 1940), Union Pacific (1939, released in Japan in 1940), Destry Rides Again(1939, released in Japan in 1941).
62 Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 47–68.
63 Report of the United States Education Mission to Japan, Submitted to the Supreme
Commander for the Allied Powers, Tokyo, March 30, 1946 (Tokyo: Kokusai Tokushin
Sha, 1946), 1.
64 Susan Smulyan, Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 83.
65 Ibid., 115.
66 Hiroshi Kitamura, Haisen to hariuddo: Senryo-ka Nihon no bunka saiken [Defeatand Hollywood: Occpuied Japan and reconstruction of Japanese culture] (Nagoya:
Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2014), 125.
67 Ibid., 85.
68 Go Ousaka and Saburo Kawamoto, Ooinaru Seibugeki [The great western movies](Tokyo: Shinshokan, 2001), 261–85.
69 Shizuko Shiba, “Establishment of the Textbook and Curriculum Library and USHome Economics Education Books under Occupation (1) : Outline of the Library and its
Design and Background,” Nihon Kateika Kyoiku Gakkaishi 40, no. 2 (1997), 40.
70 Nippon Dokusho Shimbun, no. 443, May 26, 1948, 1. My translation.
71 Noboru Miyata, Hon-yakuken no Sengoshi [A history of translation rights afterWorld War II] (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 1999), 96–97.
72 Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Shinainaru Nihon no kodomo tachini,” in Nagai fuyu [TheLong Winter], vol. 1, trans. Aya Ishida (Tokyo: Kosumoporitan-sha, 1949), 3–4. The
original English text could not be obtained; therefore, I translated Aya Ishida’s Japanesetranslation into English.
73 Nami Hattori, “Haisengo no Nagaifuyu [The long winter after defeat],” Okina Mori[The big woods] no. 11 (2015), online newsletter, https://sites.google.com/site/almanzo​
laura/bigwoods/11 (accessed August 23, 2015).
74 Go Ousaka and Saburo Kawamoto, 261–85.

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The animated TV series Anne of Green Gables, directed by Isamu Takahata, wasbroadcast from January to December 1979.
76 Mari Shimamura, Fansii no sekai: Kawaii ga hito, mono, kane wo shihaisuru [Theworld of fancy: Kawaii controls people, goods, and money] (Tokyo: Nesuko, 1991),
36–38, 187–90.
77 Yumiko Igarashi, Meimi Enjeru [Maimee angel], (1979–80, Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1989), 363. My translation.
78 Ibid., 2–3. My translation.
79 Zasshi Shimbun Sou Katarogu, 1980 nen ban. [The catalogue of magazines andnewspapers, 1980] (Tokyo: Media Research Center, 1980), 210.
80 In 1979, 70.2% of purchasers were girls between the third and sixth grades, and27.2% were girls in seventh and eighth grade (Zasshi Simbun Sou Katarogu, 210).
81 Turner, Frontier, 2.
75