We will now look at the reception of this one specific story amongst pupils who have the work assigned to them, as opposed to the more spontaneous reception of Hesse by his Japanese enthusiasts. As already mentioned, “Jugendgedenken” was first published on 1 August, 1931, in the
Würzburger General-Anzeiger and is based on “Das Nachtpfauenauge” from 1911. Soon after this, Hesse gave a clipping of the story to Kenji Takahashi, when he visited Hesse. Takahashi later wrote about his experience of visiting Hesse (August 5–6) as follows: “When I first visited Hesse in the summer of 1931, Hesse gave me a few clippings to read on the train. This story was on the cutout of Würzburger General-Anzeiger. I was absorbed in reading this in the train, forgetting about the beautiful scenery of Switzerland.”
1Hermann Hesse, Jugendgedenken (in German), ed. Kenji Takahashi (Tokyo: Ikubundo Publishing, 1959), 15; hereafter referred to as “Jugendgedenken,” I.P. 15. This is the German original text used as a teaching material for German language learners, and a short postscript by editor Takahashi is written in Japanese at the end of the book. He translated the story into Japanese and it was published in 1936. The translation was never published in book form but was included with other works in collections and other publications. The fact that this short story, which is rarely seen by readers outside Japan, has been read by a huge number of Japanese readers during their school education, is worthy of attention in the history of Hesse’s impact in Japan.
Japan’s national textbook system, which began in April 1903, continued until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.
2One of the theaters of World War II, also known in Japan as the Greater East Asia War. It began with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) on December 8, 1941 (Japan time) and the declaration of war on the United States and Great Britain, and ended with the signing of the Japanese instrument of surrender on September 2, 1945. After a transitional period after the war, textbooks written by the Ministry of Education were produced for school education until 1949, and in the same year the textbook screening system for privately published textbooks, which has continued to the present day, was also initiated. Kenji Takahashi’s translation, “Shonen no Hi no Omoide,” was first included in the
Junior High School Japanese II textbook produced by the Ministry of Education in 1947.
“Das Nachtpfauenauge” and “Jugendgedenken” have almost the same plot and the same unique frame structure. The story begins with a conversation between the “host” (“I” in the first frame) and the “guest” (“he” in the first frame). While the two are discussing the host’s butterfly collection, the guest decides to tell the host about his own childhood and his own bitter and painful memories of collecting butterflies. He begins to narrate that story of his own, referring to himself in the first person as “I.” As a boy, he was obsessed with collecting butterflies and moths. Once he tried to brag about his collection to a neighborhood boy, who was a teacher’s son and also had a beautiful collection and an expert knowledge of collecting butterflies. Therefore, he felt both envy and hatred toward this impeccable honor student. One day he learned that this neighborhood boy had a very rare Emperor Moth and wanted to see it at all costs. When he visited the boy to see the rare moth, the boy was not there, but the Emperor Moth was on the display board. While looking at the beautiful moth, he had a strong urge to take it, and stole it. When he removed the moth from the room, he tucked the collection in his pocket, fearing it would be found, and eventually destroyed it. After that he could not bear his guilty conscience and confessed what he had done to his mother. At her urging, he apologized to the neighborhood boy, telling him what he had done. But this teacher’s son did not get angry or curse. Instead, he coldly told him: “I see. You are that kind of guy.” That night, the boy took his butterfly collections and ground them to pieces with his fingers.
As noted above, the story has a unique frame structure without completion of the first frame. Therefore, it appears to be in two parts, a short first frame and then the main story from the guest’s childhood. Importantly, the narrators are different in the first half and the second half. In other words, while the host is the first-person narrator in the first half (frame), the guest is the first-person narrator in his own childhood story. This is one of the key points when we analyze the story: the issue of the narrators will be referred to again later.
In terms of privately produced textbooks, the work was first used in the Japanese Language and Literature II textbook published by Chukyo Shuppan in 1952, and since 1955 it has appeared in multiple textbooks almost every year up to the present. As of 2023, the work is included in all five authorized Japanese language textbooks for first-year junior high school students. The textbooks currently in use were adopted in 2015 after being authorized in 2014. They have been in continuous use since April 2016. This means that for at least eight years, from April 2016 to March 2024, every first-year junior-high-school student in Japan will have read “Shonen no Hi no Omoide.” While the work has not always been included in all authorized textbooks over the past seventy years, it is an undeniable fact that most junior high school students have encountered the work and, as a result, a large number of Japanese people have a shared experience of reading the work. Given their impressionable age and the various approaches taken by teachers to help them comprehend this work, it has made a strong impact on students, often deeply imprinting in their memory. For example, the publisher of the new translation of The Complete Works of Hermann Hesse, which began publication in April 2005, received many questions about the whereabouts of “Shonen no Hi no Omoide” immediately after publication began. It goes without saying that these are from the readers who want to read this story, which they read when they were junior high school students, in a new translation. This demonstrates that “Shonen no Hi no Omoide” is a story that remains in the memories of very many Japanese readers.
Even though the work has been published in school textbooks for such a long time, to the best of my knowledge, the story has rarely been the subject of academic research in the field of German literature studies in Japan.
3One exception is Neale Cunningham in his book Hermann Hesse and Japan: A Study in Reciprocal Transcultural Reception (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021), 162–64. The fact that the work is only read by junior high school students may have led to an underestimation of its value as literature, and, as a result, it may not be recognized as an important subject for analysis.
Another reason for this “blind spot” is the tendency to dismiss this story as a mere “rite of passage for youth” by associating Hesse with the romanticism of youth. For example, in Fundamental Problems of Spiritual Science, published in 1940, when Hesse’s works were becoming widely popular in Japan, there appeared a strongly disapproving reference to the content of Peter Camenzind, a work that was particularly popular at the time:
Hesse’s spiritual life is one of wandering in strange lands without a permanent home. This wandering and nomadic outlook on life has the power to attract students at today’s technical colleges. … Those who seek refuge in literature about wandering to escape from the burden of conventional thinking and theories are losers in life.
4Fundamental Problems of Spiritual Science (in Japanese), ed. Hiroyasu Tadokoro (Tokyo: Nihon Gakusei Kyokai, 1940), 48–49.At that time, the National Mobilization Law (1938) had already been enacted to support the total war that accompanied the protracted Sino-Japanese War, and the military orientation was growing stronger day by day in preparation for the possible outbreak of conflict with the Allied Nations. Based on this historical background, in the above quote there was a strong concern that young people’s minds would be poisoned by Hesse and thus misjudge the path they should pursue. Despite the unique ideological background, this biased assessment has continued since then, which has contributed to a kind of stalemate in the assessment of Hesse in Japan. This might well be a further reason why “Shonen no Hi no Omoide” has not received much attention in Japanese German studies.
Meanwhile, “Shonen no Hi no Omoide” has continued to be of significance for those involved in language education in Japan, as it has been a standard Japanese language teaching material in textbooks for many years. As if to confirm this, not only junior high school language teachers, but also researchers in Japanese language education and Japanese literature have analyzed and interpreted the structure of this short story with its educational use in mind. In particular, the teaching manuals reveal several interesting pedagogical innovations aimed at a rational reading of the literary work. Of course, teachers are expected to conduct their classes in accordance with state-mandated “Courses of Study,” which prescribe the objectives of each subject and how to handle teaching materials in order to maintain uniform educational standards throughout Japan as set out by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Thus, they must avoid carelessly asserting their own arbitrary interpretations of the work; however, the teachers’ many creative attempts to teach “Shonen no Hi no Omoide” reflect the appeal and significance of this work as a Japanese language teaching material.
One of the most frequently discussed methods in the teaching manuals is to target greater comprehension of the overall theme of the work through better understanding of the personalities of the characters. Specifically, this is a method that involves examining how the characters are established and the adjectives used to describe them, while at the same time understanding the flow and structure of the story through the relationships between the characters, in order to approach an understanding of the theme of the story. Most significant are the guest of the frame story, who is the protagonist and the narrator of the boyhood story, and his antagonist Emil, and their relationship.
5As will be explained later in detail, Emil is the teacher’s son, who lives across the courtyard from the narrator. This teacher’s son is portrayed as an intellectual figure who is far superior in butterfly collecting and is even an expert in assessing the value of butterflies. However, in “Jugendgedenken” the name of this teacher’s son, Emil, is not revealed until the latter half of the story, unlike its earlier mention in “Das Nachtpfauenauge.” Through this method the students come to understand the work, analyzing the characterizations of protagonist and antagonist discriminately as to their similarities and differences, positive and negative traits, and so on. However, in response to the story of the guest’s boyhood, many students are sympathetic towards the protagonist since he is not only a first-person protagonist but also the narrator, and is rendered more deeply than Emil, towards whom many students are antagonistic. The approach in question aims to avoid a simplistic misunderstanding of the story by helping students realize that the position of the protagonist as narrator of the story bears on their understanding of the story and tends to cause them to sympathize with him. This makes possible a more objective reading.
Incidentally, it is only relatively recently that attention to questions of narration—and the narrator—has been proposed as key to reading the story. Narratology has been a focus of attention in the field of Japanese literature for quite some time, and, in the field of German literary studies, “Erzähltheorie” (narrative theory) was already being discussed in the 1950s. Considering that attention to narratology was increasing in the 1970s, it is surprising that the issue of the narrator in Hesse’s story has received such little attention until recently.