Chapter 25
Anne Frank in the Far East
Anne in Japan
Anne Frank’s diary was first published in Japan as early as 1952. Since its first Japanese-language edition, Anne has been portrayed in Japan as an enduring and recognizable symbol of the suffering of children, starting with those who had been killed or maimed by the atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. 200,000 people died as a result of the two deadly bombs, and many were children whose bodies were found incinerated and covered in black carbon, looking much like the images we recall from the obliteration of Pompeii.
The first Japanese edition of Anne’s diary sold a remarkable 116,000 copies in only five months, just seven years after the end of the war. What could be the reason for this remarkable interest in a Holocaust victim, by the people of a country that was allied with her persecutors?
Alain Lewkowicz is a French journalist who wrote an elaborate iPad application, ‘Anne Frank in the Land of Manga’, about his investigation of the Anne Frank phenomenon in Japan. ‘She symbolizes the ultimate World War II victim,’ said Lewkowicz. ‘And that’s how most Japanese consider their own country because of the atomic bombs – a victim, never a perpetrator.’ Japan has seen the publication of at least four popular manga comic books about Anne Frank and three animated films. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told the German broadcasting service Deutsche Welle why he believed Anne’s story had so resonated with the Japanese people. ‘The Japanese love children and this is a story of a child in a terrible situation, through no fault of her own. And she shows real honesty, opening up on so many different levels, including as a teenage girl. She talks about her first kiss, about her hopes for the future. Since she never expected anyone to read her diary, it has a particular sense of authenticity.’ Rabbi Cooper ventured another possible reason, ‘A lot of young Japanese people don’t have much space or privacy, so there is also a parallel in [Anne’s] struggle to find space for themselves.’
According to Anne Frank’s and Otto Frank’s biographer Carol Ann Lee, ‘The marketing strategy in Japan had been to sell the diary as a protest against the great misfortunes brought by war. [Anne was] a young victim but one who inspired hope for the future rather than a sense of guilt for the past. Her sex further emphasised the stress on innocence.’
For many decades after the end of the war, guilt about the past wasn’t on the Japanese agenda. The country’s leaders did not use the term ‘apologize’ about the country’s brutality in the Second World War until the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, when in a speech on 15 August 1995, Prime Minister Tomiichi Muramaya finally used the Japanese word ‘owabi’, which is translated into English as ‘heartfelt apology’.
Because Anne’s diary was one of the first books to mention menstruation openly and her name had become so well-known, the word ‘Anne’s Day’ became a euphemism in Japan for the female ‘time of the month’. In the late 1960s, a manufacturer of feminine sanitary wear saw a commercial opportunity in the association between Anne and menstruation, by creating a branded ‘Anne Frank’ range of tampons. Production of these was stopped when it came to the notice of the Anne Frank-Fonds in Switzerland, who were understandably outraged.
The exhibition ‘Anne Frank in the World’ first visited Japan in 1987, and during this and subsequent tours, the exhibition was often located on the top floor of department stores. This is not unusual for cultural projects in the consumer-driven society of Japan (and actually in Britain too we have had several successful and busy exhibitions shown in shopping malls). From 2009 onwards, the focus changed from staging Anne Frank exhibitions for the wider community to that of educational establishments or cultural centres. Since then there have been over 100 different Anne Frank exhibition venues involving 300,000 participants.
Stefan Vervaecke is a Schools Improvement Officer in Amsterdam. He had become involved with the anti-racism work of the Anne Frank House back in the early 1970s, when tensions had erupted in Amsterdam over discrimination against the Surinamese community. Stefan, a graduate of Theology and Education, started his career working with Catholic schools in Amsterdam and over the years had developed good connections with Catholic missionaries throughout the Far East. In 2009 he received a call from the Anne Frank House. It was Jan Erik Dubbelman asking for some help. This was the time leading up to the 400th anniversary of the first formal trade relations established between the Netherlands and Japan in 1609, when the Dutch had been granted extensive trading rights. The Dutch had set up an East India Company outpost at Hirado to trade in exotic Asian goods such as spices, textiles, porcelain and silk. To mark the anniversary, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende, was due to attend a commemorative ceremony in Tokyo and the Anne Frank House had been invited to bring an exhibition on Anne Frank to mark the celebrations. A suitable venue quickly needed to be found.
Like many international Anne Frank projects, after Jan Erik had made the call to Stefan, a transcontinental thread of helpful connections quickly came into play. Stefan was doing some work in Hong Kong at that time, and through missionary friends in Taiwan, he was introduced to a Catholic school in the centre of Tokyo. This school was extremely happy to host an Anne Frank exhibition, and especially to mark such an auspicious occasion.
The exhibition opening took place at the Catholic school, garnering lots of positive publicity. Then the Anne Frank exhibition was invited, through Stefan’s growing Catholic schools network, to visit others. Within two years, there was a clear need to take it even wider. A local Japanese based co-ordinator of the tour was urgently needed. Again, international networks came into play.
In the 1990s, Stefan had been one of the first people to encourage widespread use of computers in Amsterdam’s schools. Some years later, in 2003, he had attended an educational conference and youth summit in Japan, where he was particularly impressed by a woman educator called Yoko Takagi. In the spring of 2011, the same Yoko received an email from Stefan Vervaecke asking for her help in co-ordinating an extended Japanese tour of the Anne Frank exhibition. Yoko had no hesitation in saying yes. She had read one of the first published editions of Anne’s diary at junior high school back in the 1950s and, perhaps surprisingly for a girl from the Far East in those days, had found Anne’s life to be ‘not exactly outside my own world’.
Yoko’s early childhood had been spent in the eastern Asian region of Manchuria, for a long time an area of dispute between China, Russia and Japan. Following an invasion of Manchuria by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1931, Japanese families had been encouraged to go and settle there. They did in large numbers, and swelled the local Chinese population more than threefold. Immediately after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War, the Soviet Union sent its army into Manchuria, ending the four years of peace between Japan and Russia during the Second World War (when the Soviet Union had been otherwise occupied defending its western borders against Nazi advances). During the nine months the Soviet army was in Manchuria, the Japanese community found themselves being regularly attacked and threatened by Soviet soldiers, often pointing guns directly at them. Yoko had a vivid memory of being five years old and threatened at gunpoint by a callous Soviet soldier. Even at such a young age, little Yoko had understood that Japanese children were being kidnapped and sold for a high price by the Soviet soldiers and that many Japanese adults were being killed. Yoko felt very fortunate that she and her family managed to survive until they were able to move back to Japan.
Yoko’s early adult life in Japan was pretty conventional. She worked in a bank, married, raised children and then at the age of 35, decided she should learn English, which she went on to teach. But then, nearing the age of 50, she did something very unconventional. She had long held a dream of going to university, and leaving her husband at home in Osaka, she flew off across the Pacific to Hawaii State University to further her English studies.
Since Yoko received the invitation from Stefan Vervaecke in 2009 to help the Anne Frank House by finding suitable venues, she has taken the exhibition to eighty places, averaging ten a year, mostly high schools. One-third of a million people have seen an Anne Frank exhibition in Japan. Yoko also feels that the Japanese interest in Anne Frank has long been due to a connection to Anne’s experience because of the suffering of children in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. But she also proposed a more sensitive and controversial reason. ‘Through looking at the genocide of the Holocaust, educators can see an important doorway into a very difficult time in Japanese history for young people to learn about – that of the cruelty of the Japanese occupying army. I hope that young people will make these connections. They know that the bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immensely cruel, but at the same time they need to learn that once wars start, human beings, and in our case the Japanese army, are capable of very cruel things,’ said Yoko.
Today, Anne Frank’s life story is taught in Japanese schools in tandem with that of Chiune Sugihara, the wartime diplomat who was the Japanese equivalent of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, in Sugihara’s case saving the lives of 6,000 Lithuanian Jews. Yoko works with the practical side of taking the exhibition around schools and once it has been set up, she equips each school with a set of resources and suggested activities. Yoko organizes the tour from her home as a volunteer, and a grant initiated by the former Vice Education Minister covers the costs of the transport of the exhibition from school to school. She has an almost spiritual description for the practicalities of finding venues: ‘When it’s hard for me to find the next site for the exhibition, something happens and suddenly there is a new site waiting. I believe Anne is working with me!’
The Anne Frank Rose of Japan
‘In the rose garden unless you retrace your steps, you’ll find no way out.’ Haiku by Tsuda Kiyoko (part of the text of ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’)
In 1960 a Belgian horticulturalist called Hippolyte Delforge created a fragrant orange blend floribunda rose he named ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’. Symbolically the new rose was grafted together from one rose that had been created in 1929, the year of Anne’s birth, and one created in the year of her death, 1945.
On reading Anne’s diary at her school in Japan in the early 1970’s, 15-year-old Michiko Otsuki became one of the thousands of young Japanese girls who were inspired to write to Otto Frank. The two corresponded for a while, during which time Otto sent Michiko a Christmas gift of a dozen of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose bushes. All but one of the bushes died, and Michiko gave the last surviving rose bush to her uncle Ryuichi Yamamuro, a former teacher who in retirement had become an expert Bonsai grafter. Mr Yamamuro grafted the European rose onto Japanese stock, and then an idea struck him. He planted ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose bushes in the Peace Gardens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then set about sending the roses, along with a copy of Anne’s diary, to schools in cities throughout the islands of Japan – from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south. Mr Yamamuro thought of the children he had taught long ago in the years before the Second World War and their sadness at being called up to fight an enemy.
Kenji Yamamuro, Ryuichi’s son, continues the sacred work of his father to this day. One of the rose bushes grows in the gardens of a church in Nishinomiya City. The church is called the Anne’s Rose Church, so named after consultation with Otto Frank. As far as it is known, it is the only church in the world named after Anne Frank.
In 2011, this remarkable story of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ roses became the basis of a musical interpretation by the British-based Ensemble Theatre Group. The group’s founder, the actress and singer Elizabeth Mansfield, had discovered an Anne Frank-inspired musical piece for piano, cello and violin entitled ‘Het Achterhuis’ (the Dutch name of Anne Frank’s diary when published) written by the composer Colin Decio. Having been introduced to Colin at one of her performances, Elizabeth was thinking about putting Anne’s own words to his music to create a new work for the Ensemble group. In the course of her research for this, she came upon the story of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose which excited her.
Elizabeth described to me her particular motivation, ‘I was interested in the correlation between Otto’s return to life after his time in Auschwitz, through his discovery and publishing of Anne’s diary, with Mr Yamamuro’s passionate commitment to grafting “Souvenir d’Anne Frank” roses, and sending them to children in Japanese schools. From opposite sides of the world, and with vastly different personal experiences, both men were committed to inspiring young people to work for peace and against injustice and racism.’ The Ensemble Theatre Group partnered with the Anne Frank Trust, who together applied for funding, and the production was launched alongside the Anne Frank exhibition at the Zion Arts Centre in Manchester. Elizabeth and her team also conducted educational workshops to further explore with students the themes of the story.
Nao Nagai was the lighting designer for Elizabeth’s production, and as her name suggests, happened to be Japanese. Using dogged determination, Nao managed to track down Michiko Otsuki, the very girl who had written to Otto Frank all those years ago. Michiko was by now in her seventies, living in Nara City, not far from Nao’s own home city of Kobe. Nao was then introduced to Kenji Yamamuro, Michiko’s cousin and son of Ryuichi Yamamuro, the original creator of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose. On a visit to Japan, Nao and Elizabeth were invited by Kenji to a special ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose-grafting event at his house, attended by about fifty people. Over tea after the rose had been grafted, Kenji spoke about his father and how much the rose had meant to him. Elizabeth and Nao also visited Michiko Otsuki who showed them all her correspondence from Otto Frank from forty years ago, which he had typed on light blue gossamer-thin ‘Par Avion’ paper, typically used in those days for expensive overseas mail.
Looking back to 2011, Elizabeth Mansfield summed up what she saw as the legacy of the fascinating story of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose and its musical interpretation. ‘Anne’s story is a complicated one. Within it lie important lessons for today and for all time. Man-made war is still with us, along with torture, genocide and persecution. People are still in flight from man-made horrors. And yet people also continue to do good for each other, and to fight against injustice and racism and for peace and understanding.’
Throughout Japan the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ roses continue to flourish. As does the Japanese people’s love of Anne Frank.
The Vietnamese Anne Frank
The Vietnam War, or what the Vietnamese refer to as ‘The American War’, left over 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese dead. It also left an indelible imprint on the national psyche of both countries.
One of those killed was a young, idealistically Communist North Vietnamese doctor, who became known after her death as the ‘Anne Frank of Vietnam’ – because of a diary that she had kept during the Vietnam War. The strange and circuitous route that enabled this young woman’s wartime diary to come to the eyes of the world is a story well worth relating.
Fresh out of medical school in the late 1960s, Dang Thuy Trâm had headed down to South Vietnam to tend wounded Viet Cong soldiers. On 22 June 1970, Thuy Trâm was walking along a jungle path dressed in her regulation Viet Cong black pyjamas, when she came upon a group of American soldiers engaged in a gun battle with their Vietcong enemy. Several of her own patients had already been killed in the offensive, and she was caught in crossfire. She took a bullet in the head and died immediately.
It so happened that the original translator of Anne Frank’s diary into Vietnamese was a woman called Dang Kim Trâm. In a twist of fate, Kim Trâm had no idea that her older sister Thuy Trâm, the very same young doctor who had been killed by the Americans, had also been keeping a wartime diary – one that would go on to sell more than 300,000 copies and would be translated into sixteen languages. When it was published, co
mparisons were drawn internationally between Thuy Trâm’s writings and those of Anne Frank.
In June 1970, days before her death, Thuy Trâm had written of the American president, ‘Nixon is foolish and crazy as he widens the war. How hateful it is! We are all humans, but some are so cruel as to want the blood of others to water their gold tree.’ In another entry, she almost foretold her destiny writing, ‘Death was so close as the bombing stripped the trees bare and tore houses to pieces’.
The country of Vietnam has had a complex history. It had managed to keep its independence from Chinese imperialism since AD 939. However, in 1859 the country’s independence was eroded by colonialist France in a series of military conquests, after which the southern third of the country became a new French colony. By 1884, the entire country had come under French rule. This situation continued until almost the middle of the twentieth century.
Ho Chi Minh was a Communist revolutionary who was the leader of the Việt Minh independence movement from 1941 onward, founded originally to fight the Japanese. In 1945 Ho Chi Minh announced the establishment of the Communist-ruled Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and eight years of fighting the French followed. After the ferocious battle of Điện Biên Phủ, 10,000 starving French troops surrendered to the Viet Minh. The 1954 Geneva Accords was eventually agreed between France and the Viet Minh, allowing the latter’s forces to regroup in the North whilst anti-communist groups settled in the South. Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam relocated to Hanoi and became the government of North Vietnam, a Communist one-party state.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 36