Chin Music Press - Adventures in Publishing - What Laura Ingalls taught Japan

What Laura Ingalls taught Japan — Part 3

Life in Japan

The great appeal of The Long Winter to the Japanese readers lay in the similarities between the Ingalls family's life and that of Japanese people during the war. Take, for instance, the following scenes in The Long Winter. An unprecedentedly long, severe blizzard prevents a train from coming to Laura's town from the East with food and supplies. Laura's family staves off hunger by sharing a few potatoes:

Ma insisted that Pa take the extra one . . . "and you must keep up your strength. Anyway, eat it to save it. We don't want it, do we, girls?" "No, Ma," they all said. "No, thank you, Pa, truly I don't want it."

As the winter lingers and supplies dwindle, Laura gets dull and touchy. When Laura finally confesses her tiredness from their poor diet, Ma reprimands Laura:

"I am so tired of brown bread with nothing on it," Laura said.

"Don't complain, Laura!" Ma told her quickly. "Never complain of what you have. Always remember you are fortunate to have it."

The severe winter Laura's family experiences in the book reminded the Japanese readers of the hardships of World War II, when Japanese people, as the emperor's subjects, were forced to live very hard lives. As many as 2,700,000 civilians, which was 4% of the population in 1941, were killed in war battles, and millions of survivors were suffering from injury, sickness and malnutrition. Nine million people lost their houses and property. Four and a half million soldiers were killed in the war, which left millions of widows and orphans at home. In 1948, more than 120,000 children lost their homes and parents and were forced to live their lives outdoors by begging, stealing and even prostituting themselves.

Yet the most terrible suffering for the Japanese during and after the war was starvation. Over a thousand civilians starved to death within the three months after the war's end. Children were extremely malnourished, and mothers saw their babies die in their arms from starvation and undernourishment. People endured hunger by eating worms, bugs and rats, which caused extremely poor sanitary conditions, and 250,000 people died from dysentery. In such unbearably hard conditions, The Long Winter seemed to the Japanese a story of themselves, especially because the book title coincidentally overlapped with a typical Japanese metaphor of "winter" as "hardships" and "spring" as "happiness and a new start."

Noriko Suzuki >> August 23, 2005

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