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Finding England Through Japan
I love England. My son loves Japan. We discovered the two countries weren’t as far apart as we thought they were.
I’m a dedicated Anglophile. I’ve spent years learning about the history and culture of the British Isles. My son loves Japanese manga (graphic novels) and anime (animated movies and TV shows), which spurred his interest in Japanese history and culture.
He discovered the Inuyasha manga series when he was ten years old and wrote a research paper on Osamu Tezuka, the father of Japanese manga in college. More than twenty years after discovering Inuyasha, he has more than 6,000 volumes in his manga collection.
He’s as comfortable reading a volume of manga from back to front as I am with listening to the accents on my favorite British soap, Coronation Street. Our interests were clearly on two different continents. Then he discovered a connection that led me on a journey to finding England through Japan.
The connection was a manga series called Emma by Kaoru Mori. The series tells the story of a young girl in Victorian England who is rescued from a life of poverty and trained to be a proper English maid. When Emma falls in love with a member of the gentry, the young couple finds themselves battling the rigid class constraints of the…
