In 1952, the year of the end of the US occupation of Japan, Anne of Green Gables (1908), a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, was translated into Japanese for the first time. It became a bestseller and educators suggested that the novel was instrumental in teaching Western family values and individualism. The prewar patriarchal system had lost its power, a shift symbolized by the enactment of the new (American-authored) Japanese Constitution that guarantees gender equality.

Scholars such as Irene Gammel have pointed out that Anne of Green Gables was well accepted in Japan due to its themes of new “womanhood” and new (that is, Western) family ideals. However, it is important to note that Anne captured Japanese readers as a girl character. Japanese magazines for girls introduced Anne with illustrations to feature Anne’s world and things—or Anne-ness—which had unique appeal, such as Edwardian fashion, Victorian interior design, and farmers’ cooking. Anne of Green Gables needs to be analyzed in a broader context of postwar Japanese girls’ culture.

I will shed light on how Japanese school girls’ magazines played an important role in the acceptance of Anne of Green Gables. Specifically, I will analyze girls’ magazines such as Shogaku Yo-nensei [Fourth Grade Elementary School] (1924-2012) that ran feature articles about Anne, using illustrations to trace Anne-ness as the gist of girlhood in the work. As I hope to show, magazines depicted Anne not as a poor orphan girl’s story but as a guidebook to attractive British Edwardian culture in Canada. Eventually, Anne-ness helped create spin-off genres such as Anne cooking books, Anne sewing books, and Anne guidebooks of Prince Edward Island.