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Alice
in Wonderland and
Anne of Green Gables are just two of the more
prominent Western stories that have become fully integrated
into Japanese popular culture. In the 1980s some reference
to Anne or Alice appeared daily on television, in print
media, or in practically any conversation with a teenaged
girl (Craig). Since the eighties, those stories have been supplanted by
other Western or “foreign” narratives,
but these new narratives are similarly pervasive and
similarly imbedded deep into the culture
(Martinez). But when I was first living and working
in Japan in the mid 80s, Wonderland and Green Gables
were the bomb.
For my student’s model
of tomogachi, the narrative behind Anne-chan was that
she had run away from Green Gables and stumbled into
a Wonderland similar to the one dreamed up by Lewis
Carroll. In this alternate Wonderland,
Anne-chan is killed by a malevolent playing card spirit,
leaving a ghost of her former self adrift in the world
of everyday electronic Japan, shifting from device to
device (television, phone line, rice cooker, video game)
as she searches for someone to nurture her and keep
her from vanishing altogether.
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