What Laura Ingalls taught Japan — Part 2

In the 1930s and 40s, he envisioned democratizing Asian countries, including the Philippines, as the expanding frontier — the line of civilization in Turner's theory — of the American West. In a 1947 speech, he romantically described his military campaigns as follows: "The American soldier, reflecting ... those fine traits of character, outgrowth of the American home" brought hope in the name of civilization to "hundreds of millions of backward peoples" in the Far East.

MacArthur used the frontier rhetoric to justify his military campaigns in the Far East, in which the "savages" and "wilderness" of Asia were to be civilized by the sweeping power of American frontiersmen like MacArthur himself. MacArthur especially considered Japan as "Western civilization's last earth frontier" and often used the term "frontier" to describe his military campaigns.

And yet the frontier theory was not entirely new to the Japanese. It had already made inroads into Japan in the 1930s. Yasaka Takagi, well known as a "pioneer of American 'area studies' in Japan," was a Japanese scholar who studied American history in the US in the 1920s. Significantly, it was Frederick Jackson Turner under whom Takagi studied American history at Harvard University. Takagi was deeply influenced by Professor Turner, whom he admired as the "first and best teacher in American history." Takagi wrote a great number of papers and articles on the issues of Japanese democratization and American history in the prewar period in which one can clearly see Turner's influence.

During the Occupation period, Takagi collaborated with general headquarters in establishing the new, democratic Japan and worked strenuously on drafting the New Constitution of Japan. We can only speculate exactly how much Takagi's suggestions affected the establishment of the new Constitution, but Takagi was mostly satisfied with it, as it adopted American democratic principles but still preserved the traditional Japanese Emperor system and some other cultural traditions.

Like Takagi, translator Aya Ishida, who was educated in the US, also seems to have shared a belief in the frontier myth. As Ishida claimed in 1949, through the Little House books, the two concepts — democracy and the West — were tightly coupled in postwar Japan:

We can see in the Little House books that the spirit of freedom and independence gave pioneers satisfaction and happiness . . . They considerably contributed to create the real America. More than any teachings, the real life story, the real story of creating a democratic country in the Little House series is educationally most effective in inculcating Japanese children with (the spirit of) democracy.
(my translation)

Ishida obviously had translated The Long Winter with a view to promoting it as "the real story of creating a democratic country" — which was precisely what MacArthur expected.