Chasing the White Rabbit in Tokyo:

100 Years of Alice in Japan

Samantha Johnson

Senior Honors Thesis

Department of Asian Studies
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2017

Approved:

Mark Driscoll (Thesis Advisor)

Department of Asian Studies
UNC-Chapel Hill

Dwayne Dixon
Department of Asian Studies
UNC-Chapel Hill

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 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................3

Abstract ..........................................................................................................5

Introduction: Into the Rabbit Hole .................................................................6

Chapter One: Translating Alice.....................................................................15

Chapter Two: Manga Alice and the Gothic...................................................36

Chapter Three: Being Alice...........................................................................53

Conclusion: Alice Lives On .........................................................................72

Appendices ...................................................................................................78

Bibliography ..................................................................................................88

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 Acknowledgements

Over the course of this project, I have had the opportunity to work with many

great people, and without them I have no doubt that I would never have made it this far.

First I must thank my advisor Dr. Mark Driscoll, who put up with my seemingly

endless barrage of questions every other Tuesday in his office at New West. I would also

like to thank my second reader Dr. Dwayne Dixon, an adjunct Asian Studies faculty

member from Duke University, for all of his valuable assistance with this project. I must

also acknowledge Japanese Resources Specialist Ms. Natsuko Sawaya, who helped me to

locate great Japanese resources for the translation chapter.

I definitely need to thank everyone involved with my summer 2016 study abroad

experience in Chiba, including my host family in Narashino, the Carolina Asia Center

(whose generous contributions through the Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship

made it possible for me to visit Japan for the first time,) the staff at IES Abroad Tokyo

(hello Ishikawa san!), and those I surveyed in my bukkirabou-na (direct) Japanese at

Laforet in Harajuku one blazing hot Monday in July.

I could not have gotten to this point without my Japanese senseis here at UNC,

including Aratake sensei, Sawamura sensei, Iwashita sensei, and Kato sensei, as well as

those senseis at previous schools (Dr. John Mertz and Sera sensei at NC State come to

mind) who have all helped me to understand Japanese and Japanese culture more than I

ever thought possible. 心から、どうもありがとうございました。

My honors thesis seminar group was also instrumental to the completion of this

project: Emma Barthold, Estelle McQueen, Megan Pallante, and Dr. Jan Bardsley, thank

you all so much for your tireless workshopping. Things turned out fine in the end!

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 Last but certainly not least, thank you to my parents, Sean and Michelle Johnson;

my brother, Scott Johnson; and my boyfriend Kirby Tung. All of you have stood by me

through the many successes, failures, birthdays, and unbirthdays that make up a life.

Thank you all so much for supporting me as I followed the white rabbit to Tokyo.

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 Abstract

Chasing the White Rabbit in Tokyo:

100 Years of Alice in Japan

Samantha Johnson

Faculty Advisor: Mark Driscoll

Alice appears everywhere in Japan, from Lolita dress prints to Disney

princess keychains, and even in manga. This thesis analyzes representations
of Alice across time in the Japanese imagination. The first chapter explores
the translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Japanese,
ultimately concluding that there are at least 2 Alice types visible within
Japanese translations: the Meiji Alice and the Disney Alice. The second
chapter considers manga as yet another avenue for Alice adaptation,
exploring two mid-2000s manga that present contrasting takes on Alice’s
identity. This chapter also considers the implications of a Gothic or Dark
Alice, concluding that this type of Alice is nearly absent in the Western
imaginary. The third chapter explores what it means to perform Alice in the
everyday and in street fashion, finding that many Lolitas define Alice as a
symbol of cute, and do not attach any shame to this lack of substance. At this
point I incorporate data from informal interviews conducted in the summer
of 2016 with students at Kanda University in Chiba, as well as with Lolitas
in Harajuku, Tokyo.
I conclude that the Japanese Alice is almost a stranger to Carroll’s.
She has a darker side found in Kanai Mieko’s well-known 1972 short story
“Rabbits” and contemporary Gothic Lolita fashion, as discussed in chapter 2.
Notably, the parts of Carroll’s Alice story that evade direct translation into
Japanese are often omitted, so that her Wonderland becomes simpler and
very much a part of kawaii culture. This forms the backbone of the pure
kawaii Alice of chapter 3 who is just an icon of cute, which may not be such
a bad thing. This thesis argues that Alice splinters off into at least five “sub-
Alices”: a Meiji Alice, a noir Alice, a male Alice, a pure kawaii Alice, and a
Disney Alice, each with a unique Japanese-ness.

Keywords: Alice; Alice in Wonderland; Lewis Carroll; Lolita Fashion;

Gothic Lolita; Kawaii; Shoujo; Japanese Street Fashion; Japanese Popular
Culture; Japanese Translation

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 Introduction: Into the Rabbit Hole

“… Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never
before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it,
and, brimming with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time
to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.”

- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

When I first entered one of the basement boutiques, a small and cramped space

with a rack full of dresses off to one side and an extravagant gilded mirror in the center, I

could perceive a reasonable suspicion or fear in the shopkeepers, dressed in Lolita

fashion, as soon as I approached asking about Alice in Wonderland. I entered that

(literally) underground world of Lolita in the summer of 2016, from June to July, when I

had the opportunity to stay in Chiba Prefecture, Japan living with a host family on a study

abroad program. The program included classes taught in Japanese at a nearby university.

For our final project in my Japanese class, each of us was instructed to conduct surveys in

Japanese about a topic of our choosing with passersby on the street, the results of which

we would present to the class on our last day. I chose to ask about the Alice prints and

designs used in “Lolita” dresses, Lolita being a subculture fashion with a focus on frilly

princess dresses with petticoats and a variety of flashy accessories that is remarkably

popular at comic book conventions in the United States, but originated in Japan.1

Although I will continue my discussion of the survey in Chapter 3: Being Alice,

for now I will introduce the particular focus of my research, which was expanded from

being focused solely on Alice-themed Lolita dresses (why was Alice imagery appearing

in dresses for a specifically Japanese street fashion?) to becoming inclusive of Alice as

1
N.B. Lolita fashion emerged in roughly the late 1990s and took off from there,
experiencing its peak popularity in the early to mid 2000s.

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she appears throughout Japanese popular culture, in the form of translation, manga, and

fashion. Hence, each chapter of the thesis explores one of these avenues of Alice

adaptation into Japanese culture. What was intriguing to me beginning the project, and

that continues to intrigue me even now that the project has concluded, is how and why a

beloved classic children’s book character like Alice was specifically chosen to become

the icon of cute that she is today, and even at times an icon of the dark and Gothic. In the

first chapter, Chapter 1: Translating Alice, I will of course be looking at translations of

the Alice books into Japanese over time, discovering the first few “Alice types” that will

become important to the remainder of the thesis. Manga then becomes the focus of

Chapter 2: Manga Alice and the Gothic, which is also a place for me to explore the darker

side of Alice as well as Gothic Lolita fashion. Finally, the third chapter, Chapter 3: Being

Alice, will highlight the major findings of my surveying in Chiba and Harajuku, as well

as a few tangential experiences in Tokyo that gave me a lasting impression of the way

Alice functions in daily life in Japan.

Before delving into these chapters, we must first pause to ask a crucial

foundational question: who is Alice? To answer that question, it’s important to know a

little about her creator: Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a scholar,

mathematician and poet who studied at Christ Church College, Oxford and remained

there after graduation as a lecturer in mathematics. He was particularly interested in

logical puzzles and dedicates a large part of his writing, including the Alice stories, to

exploring them. He began photography as a hobby in 1856, a relatively new technology

at the time, and specialized in family portraiture, with children in particular as a frequent

subject. The daughters of one family in particular, the Liddells, proved to be frequent

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subjects for his portraits: Lorina (whom he called Prima), Alice (Secunda), and Edith

(Tertia), ordered by year of birth in Latin. They were the daughters of Henry George

Liddell, a dean at Christ Church. After a summer boating trip with the Liddell sisters, he

illustrated his first manuscript of the beloved Alice tale, a story he had told them on the

boat for entertainment: Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. It then became Alice’s Hour in

Elfland before the author finally settled on its current title, Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland. He gave the first copy to the real Alice in 1865 as a Christmas present.

Lewis Carroll once wrote in a letter to one Miss M.E. Manners of the fictional Alice:

“Permit me to offer you my sincere thanks for the very sweet verses you have
written about my dream-child (named after a real Alice, but none the less a
dream-child) and her Wonderland.” (Collingwood, 714).

From this clarification, there is the sense that while a real or model Alice exists, she is not

to be confused with Carroll’s “dream-child” Alice, the heroine of his two novels. It is

also worth mentioning that the Alice in the original John Tenniel illustrations is portrayed

with mid-length blonde hair, while the real Alice had short black hair. While a great

variety of other things about the eccentric Dodgson are still debated today, chief among

them the nature of his child photography and to what extent he might be considered

pedophilic, if at all, for his fascination with children, it is hardly debatable that Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland is his magnum opus. As one biographer writes, “The whole

idea [for the book] came like an inspiration into his mind, and that sort of inspiration does

not often come more than once in a lifetime. Nothing which he wrote afterwards had

anything like the same amount of freshness, of wit, of real genius” (Collingwood, 211-

12). Indeed, literary critics and general readers alike adored the Alice books more than he

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had ever anticipated. Much like today, Alice in her original era was widely consumed and

read; the book became a part of popular culture almost immediately:

“‘Alice’ has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Dutch, while one
poem, ‘Father William,’ has even been turned into Arabic. Several plays have
been based upon it… [and] Tenniel's pictures… have also adorned wall-papers
and biscuit-boxes. Mr. Dodgson himself designed a very ingenious "Wonderland"
stamp-case; there has been an "Alice" birthday-book; at schools, children have
been taught to read out of "Alice," while the German edition, shortened and
simplified for the purpose, has also been used as a lesson-book. With the
exception of Shakespeare's plays, very few, if any, books are so frequently quoted
in the daily Press as the two ‘Alices’” (Ibid., 214-15).

There is a sense of surprise in this paragraph that any part of Carroll would be published

into a language as far-removed from its original as Arabic. Yet the story is itself far-

removed from British conventions and reality, making it appealing as a children’s story

across cultures: as soon as Alice sets foot in Wonderland, she is spirited away and must

learn the rules of a new world completely unlike English high society, but one that

Carroll occasionally uses as a vehicle for parody of the concept of royalty so integral to

the fabric of England’s history, a concept that is by no means unique to England. Alice’s

journey can also be seen as representing a shift from the world of a child to the world of

an adult: however, like a child, she must learn the rules of this new world through games,

like the well-known scene in which Alice plays a game of croquet with the Queen of

Hearts. However, by the second book Through the Looking-Glass, she is a queen herself

and can invent her own games with rules for others to follow.

Regarding Japanese translations of the Alice stories, a particular focus of this

thesis, the first Japanese translation of any Alice story, as essayist Yoshiyuki Momma

notes in his essay “Alice in Japanese: Named One of ‘The Best 100’”, was Through the

Looking-Glass by translator Tenkei Hasegawa in 1899. Momma notes that Japanese may

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be the only language in which this work was translated before the more critically

acclaimed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Interestingly, the original target audience

for this story was not young girls, but rather young boys, as it was serialized in Shōnen

Sekai (Boys’ World) and would not appear in a girls’ publication until 1908, with Shōjo

no Tomo (Girls’ Friends). Although the total number of Japanese Alice editions extant is

now estimated at over 373, it is a daunting task for any Japanese translator to take on

Carroll’s “full wit and flavor… it was almost impossible to translate [his] jokes, puns,

nonsense, and parodies. So in early editions, some parts of the Alice books were omitted”

(Momma 316). Given the relative difficulty of translating her story from the context and

language of Victorian England to one that would make sense to Japanese children, its

current popularity with Japanese people of all ages may come as a surprise. Many of

those I surveyed this past summer in Chiba and Harajuku would immediately ask if I was

talking about the Disney Alice: indeed, she is perhaps the most pervasive representation

of Alice in modern Japan. Her presence can be felt in a themed café in Shibuya, Tokyo

Disneyland in Maihama (only 20 minutes by train from the university I attended,)

children’s graphic T-shirts, and even minutiae like the little keychains that adorn

schoolgirl’s bags. Whether they were more familiar with the Disney movie or Carroll’s

original, not one person of the 22 I interviewed for the survey answered that they had

never heard of her.

Given Alice's pervasiveness as a symbol in Japanese culture, I found myself with

perplexing questions during my stay in Japan and even on the plane ride home: if

everyone in Japan is so familiar with Alice, in what ways do they understand her? How

might common Japanese representations differ from those abroad? This became the focus

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and the impetus of my research: I sought to find the primary ways she is interpreted in

Japanese, which I argue are literary, visual, and consumer or sartorial culture. From there,

I found that there is almost a “spectrum of Alices” in Japanese adaptation, ranging from a

cutesy Meiji Alice with a bob haircut to a violent murderess from a 1970s short story. I

should note, of course, that like any character, I believe that Alice does not exist in a

vacuum; she can even fall anywhere on the moral spectrum. In other words, the findings I

present here will inevitably change with the passing of time, as the street fashion trends

of today give way to newer fashions, so too will the Japanese iconography associated

with Alice evolve and shift. Nevertheless, I find it important to take stock here, in this

moment, of the progress that has been made thus far in the world of Japanese Alice

adaptation, and how the Alice found in the mediums of manga and translation has been

further translated into fashion.

Review of Primary and Secondary Sources

One of the great joys of pursuing this topic is the ability to explore contemporary

manga sources and their portrayals of Alice, as in Ikumi Katagiri and Ai Ninomiya’s Are

You Alice?, a 2010 manga featuring a dark and twisted Wonderland with a male Alice

(and even a male Red Queen) at its center. In delving into this contemporary manga, I

will not only be able to explore what makes this male Alice tick, but also show what kind

of aesthetic for Alice those in Chapter 3 (“Being Alice”) might be attempting to emulate

with their street fashions. Manga is of course not the only contemporary source for

redefining Alice: Kanai Mieko’s 1972 short story “Rabbits” also shows an incredibly

different take on a beloved children’s book character that in many ways no longer

11
resembles the original, not the least of which involves the story’s grotesque violence and

vague ending. The most interesting aspect of exploring the contemporary in Alice

adaptations is simply the fact that she is even being expanded or commented upon at all

in today’s Japanese literature, which attests to her enduring popularity in the face of a

rapidly changing society.

Moving onto the world of translation, a good source to begin with is Yoshiyuki

Momma’s essay, cited previously. He provides an overview of the history of Alice

translation in Japan, including aspects of Carroll’s original that have been frequently

changed to appeal to an audience of Japanese children. Although it is a much older source,

I also found Warren Weaver’s 1964 book Alice in Many Tongues useful for exploring the

differences across languages in Alice in Wonderland translations, especially given the

fact that Weaver is good about breaking down a scene from Carroll’s original line by line

in multiple languages, including Japanese. Weaver makes remarkably astute observations

about which languages were best at capturing what Carroll was communicating in the

original English version, and how linguistic limitations may have prevented Japanese

translators from achieving an exactly identical work.

Another interesting pathway for my thesis lies in discussion of Japanese youkai,

for which two sources will prove invaluable: the beginning of Michael Dylan Foster’s

Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Youkai provides a

useful summary of the nature of youkai (which proves to be an incredibly open-ended

definition.) As well, Yei Theodora Ozaki’s The Japanese Fairy Book presents many

traditional Japanese folk stories featuring these youkai in a narrative context, including

one story that I feel shares similarities with Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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that are compelling and may shed light onto how and why Alice came to be such a

popular figure with Japanese children. The story in question is “The White Hare and the

Crocodiles”, which features a personified hare that is able to have a conversation with a

man and becomes quickly distrustful of humans, much like the White Rabbit at the

beginning of Carroll’s story. Although it is certainly not the only Japanese folk tale

featuring a talking rabbit, it is useful in that it shows that such stories were intended to

help children learn moral lessons, so that Alice’s story (although lacking a moral lesson

in either version) featuring an array of talking animals and a vast kingdom as a backdrop

would not be an alien concept. The White Hare of Inaba is in fact a popular folk character

in Japan, so I will also give a brief history of this figure and theorize as to how statues in

his likeness may have contributed to an acceptance of Carroll’s White Rabbit and March

Hare.

The primary and secondary sources on Alice in these various contexts suggest

compelling questions for future research. What other Western children’s book references

appear in contemporary manga? Is there a Japanese predecessor to Alice Liddell in folk

tales, perhaps beyond the realm of youkai? Do Alice translations in other languages,

particularly Asian languages, face the same challenges that Japanese Alice translations

face? What makes a “good” translation or adaptation of a Western story into another

culture? Are other female children’s story protagonists from the West (such as Heidi) as

significant as Alice is in Japan, and if not, what factors contribute to this difference?

What do Japanese and Western illustrators do differently with the early Alice translations

(in more depth than I would be able to explore in the scope of my thesis)? In countries

besides England and the United States, is Alice a cultural phenomenon to the same extent

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that she is in Japan, and if so, does ease of translation into the other language play a

significant role in her acceptance?

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 Chapter One: Translating Alice

As seen in the introductory chapter, translation of the Alice stories into Japanese

has had a long and remarkable history, beginning oddly enough with Through the

Looking-Glass at the turn of the century, which appeared in a serialized shounen (boys)

magazine in 1899 and continued with a similar offering in a shoujo (girls) magazine in

1908. With titles like “A Golden Key” (Kin no Kagi) and “School in the Sea” (Umi no

Gakkou), these translations remain fairly different from Carroll’s original story in

Through the Looking-Glass. Not until 1910 do we see an attempt at a more direct

translation of Carroll’s ideas from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Japanese. This

occurs in 1910, when Buddhist priest and translator Eikan Maruyama publishes his

translation Aichan no yume monogatari, or Ai-chan’s Dream Story. Interestingly, his

translation blends Japanese storytelling techniques. This blending is of course evident

first in the title: the name Alice has become the cutesier nickname of Ai-chan, befitting

its target audience (Japanese children, particularly young girls).

This 1910 translation is only one of over 373 Japanese editions of Alice published

in Japan to this day (Momma, 316). However, I find it fitting to begin this chapter's

analysis of translation with Maruyama’s Aichan no yume monogatari, and then to

proceed chronologically from 1910 onwards. In this chapter, I will analyze not only

Maruyama’s take on the Alice stories, but also an adaptation from the Meiji period

(resulting in a very interesting Meiji Alice,) another translation of Disney’s Alice in the

1950s, and a third from the 1960s which was also analyzed previously by scholar Warren

Weaver. By exploring sections of these translations in close detail, I hope to demonstrate

first and foremost the existence of distinct “types” of Japanese Alice not found in the

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Western Alice imaginary, and finally to emphasize this strange (fushigi) quality of

Carroll’s Alice. Following this trajectory, we learn that she can be adapted in so many

different iterations when read and translated by different people, even those who live

within the same cultural context.

Turning our attention to Maruyama’s translation, we begin with the cover art,

which is drawn in an art nouveau style befitting the time period of the 1910s, in the

manner of artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939). In the below side-by-side comparison, I

have chosen to juxtapose Maruyama’s Alice as depicted in the cover artwork with an

1897 piece by Alphonse Mucha that uses a similar color palette. The eye-catching art

nouveau feature consistent in both pieces is the fanciful vine-like trellis behind Alice

holding her doll, which comes in the Mucha piece in the form of the spiraling flowers

behind the seated woman in the white dress. Although in this particular Mucha example

the font of the text above this trellis is not cursive, in some of his other works

(particularly his absinthe advertisements) the text is rendered in smoke. This style

resonates with the title of Aichan no yume monogatari above little Ai-chan and her doll,

albeit in kana characters. The pale green tones and floral accents used in both images, as

well as the way both figures appear to be looking upwards in the direction of a point past

the viewer, led me to draw the comparison between this depiction of Alice and Mucha’s

art nouveau pieces. While one striking difference is of course the clean lines and simple

details in the piece accompanying Maruyama’s translation, this is likely accounted for by

either an expensive and somewhat limiting printing process or a Japanese aesthetic value

that includes the use of cleaner lines.

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Figure 1 Left: Illustration from Aichan no yume monogatari (Aichan's Dream Story)
trans. Eikan Maruyama; Right: "Monaco Monte Carlo" by Alphonse Mucha (1897),
retrieved from The Mucha Foundation web site.

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Whichever the case may be, there is still a clear similarity between the styles of Mucha

and this Japanese illustrator, whether a product of the times or the result of an

intercultural exchange of artistic themes.

While John Tenniel’s original illustrations that accompanied Alice’s Adventures

and Wonderland all show Alice with blonde (or at least not dark, even in monochrome)

hair and no doll, Maruyama’s illustrator choose to depict the Alice on this cover with

dark hair, brown eyes, and a doll. This is despite the fact that, in my edition of the

Maruyama translation, Tenniel illustrations are even embedded in the chapters. As

mentioned previously, the name of “Ai-chan” is certainly not a reference to any nickname

given to Alice in Carroll’s original story, so we notice a domestication of Alice by name

in much the same way as we see in the depiction of her features. Both these changes

show that Maruyama and company desired in some ways to give Alice a new Japanese

identity: with both the name change and this illustration with dark brown hair and eyes, it

is a far cry from Tenniel’s Alice, the latter of which may even have longer hair than Ai-

chan (although it is difficult to tell if the rest of the hair is simply trailing down her back

out of view.) Either way, the cover, as the first thing a child would see peering into the

story magazine, must be able to successfully inspire this young Japanese reader to turn

the page. By introducing Ai-chan rather than Tenniel’s blonde British Alice from the

outset, Maruyama’s translation can appeal to both those children with an interest in

foreign adventure stories (since the illustration is drawn in a Western style a la Mucha)

and those who would prefer to relate themselves directly with the main character and her

matching (Japanese) appearance, name, and story.

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 Continuing on to the actual contents of the story, we see that it is divided into nine

sections. The first is Usagi no ana e (Into the rabbit hole), followed by Namida no ike

(The pool of tears), Koukasu reesu to nagabanashi (Caucus race and long talk), Tokage

no “jinkou” (Very roughly translated to “The prince lizard,”) Imomushi no kunkuwai

(The advice of the caterpillar), Buta ni koshou (Pig and pepper), Kichigahi no sawakuwai

(The mad tea party), Jousama no marinageba (The queen’s ball-toss ground) and

Umigame no hanashi (Story of the sea turtle). These chapter titles show few changes

from the original. The only major differences appear to be Chapter 4 (in which the focus

is shifted from the rabbit to the gardener lizard who falls down the chimney), Chapters 8

and 9 (where crochet is swapped for the more simplistic term “ball-toss” and the Mock

Turtle for a sea turtle,) and the fact that Chapters 10 through 12 are omitted entirely,

likely as a space-saving measure. In looking at Maruyama’s translation, we will only look

at a small portion of the first chapter, before then moving into analysis of brief excerpts

from 1911, 1952, and 1961 versions.

In Maruyama’s first chapter, "Into the Rabbit Hole," the story begins with Alice

and her sister idling by the riverbank, staying true to the Carroll opening. Ai-chan

laments that there is nothing fun to do now that the stories have run out and they are left

with regular books:

絵もなければ話もない書物が何の役に立つだろうか？

E mo nakereba hanashi mo nai hon ga nan no yaku ni tatsu darou ka?

What is the point of a book without illustrations and stories?

What is worth noting about this opening is that it remains so true to Carroll’s original

language so as to be identical, and in fact this continues save for minor nuances unique to

19
British English, as we will see shortly. Next comes the interesting segment in which Ai-

chan comes across the White Rabbit who pulls the timepiece out of his waistcoat pocket.

As in Carroll’s original chapter, it takes a while before she realizes that anything is out of

the ordinary about this:

又愛ちゃんは、兎が道から駆け出して来て、「あァー、遅くなった」なん
て言うだろうとは些とも思いませんでした。（後からよく考えて見れば不
思議だが、その時にはそれが全く当たり前のように思われました）

Mata Aichan wa, usagi ga michi kara kakedashite kite, “Aah, osoku natta!” nante
iu darou to wa chitsu to mo omoimasen deshita. (Ato kara yoku kangaete mireba
fushigi da ga, sono toki ni wa sore ga mattaku atarimae no you ni
omowaremashita.)

When back-translated into English, this translates roughly as follows:

Again when the rabbit came before Alice in the road and said, “Aah, I’m late!”
she did not think it was very strange. (After thinking a while after the fact it was
certainly strange to her, but at the time she had thought it was definitely normal.)

Then, to compare the above with what we find in Carroll’s original text:

“There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very
much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be
too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to
have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural) […]”
(Carroll 13).

Beyond the way that reading Carroll’s version aloud almost seems to trigger a natural

British accent, it is interesting that Maruyama stayed loyal to the original language

Carroll used given the natural constraints of the (flipped, from the perspective of an

English speaker) Japanese sentence structure. What I find most fascinating about this

opening passage in Maruyama’s translation, however, is a rather large omission as Alice

is falling down the rabbit hole into the world of Wonderland. First, in a manner true to

the original, the duration of the fall is emphasized:

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 兎の穴は暫くの間トンネルのように真直ぐに通じて居ました。止まろうと
思う隙もない程急に、愛ちゃんは非常に深い井戸の中へ落ちて、び、ッ、
し、ょ、り、になりました。

Usagi no ana wa shibaraku no aida tonneru no you ni massugu ni tsuujite

imashita. Tomarou to omou hima mo nai hodo kyuu ni, Aichan wa hijou ni fukai
ido no naka e ochite, bi, ss, sh, yo, ri, ni narimashita.

The rabbit hole continued down for some time, as if she’d fallen through a tunnel.
Just when she thought it might never end, suddenly, Aichan fell down a very deep
well and was drenched.

You will notice here that I did not attempt to translate the onomatopoeic sound of being

drenched with water, bisshori, as no English equivalent truly exists. There are many

changes in this translation beyond the new onomatopoeia of course: take, for example,

the fact that Maruyama cut around a page and a half’s worth of ramblings from Alice’s

inner monologue, ruminating about geography, her cat Dinah, and whether or not cats eat

bats (Carroll’s nonsense and riddles coming through full-force) before being amusingly

interrupted by the impact with the hard ground—of sticks and dry leaves.

In fact, while the rabbit hole does become a “well” partway through the journey

down to Wonderland in both Maruyama’s version and Carroll’s original, it is only in

Maruyama’s that we get the added detail that she lands in water and is drenched. It is

interesting to see that, in many instances Maruyama will take the literal translation of

what Carroll has written (for instance, the well here, or the Mock Turtle, which is hardly

a turtle at all in the original) and truly keep the original essence of the word, even if

Carroll, as with the well, abandons it partway.

Although I am hesitant to leave the discussion of Eikan Maruyama’s translation

so soon, it is interesting to see where Carroll’s ideas, as filtered through Maruyama’s

imagination, are applied and alternately discarded in the next iteration of Alice. Only a

21
Figure 2 This illustration by Yoshimura Tsubakihana comes from a 1911
collection of Japanese children’s fairy tales and features Alice clad in a
kimono and the “Drink Me” message translated into polite Japanese. In the
digital collection of the National Diet Library, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan.

22
year later, illustrator Yoshimura Tsubakihana skillfully renders Alice in Meiji-period

style in his illustrations included with the 1911 children’s book Dreams of Children:

Feature-Length Fairy Tales (Kodomo no yume: Chouhen otogibanashi). Interestingly, in

one illustration (which I have chosen to highlight here,) he does not give Alice a face or

identity. Instead, he focuses on her traditional Japanese clothing (in this case a kimono)

and short haircut adorned with an enormous bow. This recalls that short hair began to

come into fashion and was especially popular with children during this time. The

swimming mouse (swimming in a pool consisting of Alice’s tears) is consistent with the

original Carroll illustrations by John Tenniel, but here minor details such as the keys on

the table and a pair of fashionable gloves are brought to the forefront, along with the

peculiar touch of water striders (amenbo). In little details like the flowers that the key

appears to rest on, we find the beginnings of a shoujo manga aesthetic, as decorative

touches like flowers (especially roses) become standard for the genre. As is the case even

in modern shoujo manga, the flowers are just decorative girly touches: for the most part,

they don’t “exist” in the space in the same way that the key and bottle do, or even the

way a bouquet of flowers would. (The shoujo manga aesthetic will be discussed more in

the next chapter.)

Looking at the caption, I worked out a rough translation:

最後には涙が池のやうに廊下一杯漲って
Shimahi ni wa namida ga ike no yau ni rouka ippai minagitte

Finally the tears, like a pond, overflow the corridor

Back-translated this way, the caption reveals one important detail about the illustration:

the presence of the amenbo is not random, in that Alice’s tears are likened to a pond in

23
the story, so it would make sense that water striders appear to populate it. This illustration,

much like the cover of the Maruyama translation, provides a glimpse into the world of

early Alice translation, showing how these early illustrators and translators worked

together to give Carroll’s works appeal for Japanese children while still remaining true

(mostly) to the plot details found in the original.

While translation of Western children’s literature in Japan stagnates during World

War II, the arrival of the Disney animated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

in the 1950s (for better or for worse) rekindles an interest in Alice in Japan, and certainly

picture books are an ideal vehicle by which children can be exposed to her story at a

young age while also developing their reading skills. As seen with the Eikan Maruyama

1910 translation, beginnings are particularly important as an instant hook for the young

reader:

みなさんは、ふしぎの国って、ごぞんじですか。
Minasan wa, fushigi no kuni tte, gozonji desu ka?
Has everyone heard of Wonderland?

This is the opening line to the 1952 Walt Disney ehon (picture book) version of Alice in

Wonderland, with its beautiful Disney movie-inspired vintage illustrations and a kind of

punchy writing style that makes the story accessible for young Japanese children who

may be just learning to read. This opening line establishes a kind of implied familiarity

with the source material in the form of Wonderland: fushigi no kuni (literally, a strange

country), a phrase children may have heard before even if they’ve never read a word of

Alice’s story prior to this initial ehon exposure. The illustration on the first page shows

Alice cradling a dog, which may be the puppy from the garden back home. Here the dog

is not giant, as it would be if she were first entering Wonderland in her shrunken form. If

24
this is pre-rabbit hole, then, the other characters shown around her (namely the Cheshire

Cat, Dodo bird, and playing cards) may not currently inhabit the same fictional space

either. Perhaps here they serve as foreshadowing, and also as a reminder to the young

reader of what Wonderland is all about in the first place: an eccentric cast of characters

that truly make it a different world.

At the bottom of the first page, the remainder of the book is set up as a problem:

… そのふしぎな国へ、たったひとりで、でかけていきました。
どうして そんなところへ、いったのでしょう。

Sono fushigi na kuni e, tatta hitori de, dekaketeikimashita.

Doushite sonna tokoro e, itta no deshou ka?

She went out all alone into that Wonderland. Why did she go to that place?

As is the case with children’s picture books in English as well, almost every page must be

a page-turner to hold the attention and interest of a small child, and keep them engaged

through the difficult task of reading. However, it is also interesting to compare this with

Lewis Carroll’s actual intent in crafting the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: it

was often a place for him to experiment with and puzzle over different riddles outside of

an academic paper. While this example is certainly not a riddle, games and following

rules are indeed objects of fascination for children, exactly like the Mad Hatter’s tea party,

which appears later on in a very truncated form even in this Disney picture book edition.

In these sorts of controlled environments and contexts (i.e. a story; a tea party; a game of

croquet with flamingoes) both Alice and the reader mature and learn to navigate the

world around them. As readers navigate what may be one of their first fictional stories in

book format, Alice is also navigating Wonderland and its many complexities and oddities,

25
and the storyteller (originally Carroll) is navigating the world of logic and riddles,

adapting it for a new audience.

Continuing on to the next page of the Disney version, there is this initial

description of the White Rabbit, an iconic figure in popular culture both in the United

States and England as well as Japan:

あるとき、一ぴきの白うさぎが、かいちゅう時計を見い見い、「おそくな
った、こりゃたいへんだ。」と、ひとりごとをいいながら、アリスの目の
まえを走っていきました。

Aru toki, ippiki no shirousagi ga, kaichuu tokei wo miimii, “Osoku natta, korya
taihen da.” to, hitorigoto wo iinagara, Arisu no me no mae wo hashitte ikimashita.

One day, one White Rabbit, looking hurriedly at his pocketwatch, said to himself
“I’m late; this is awful,” as he ran right before Alice’s eyes.

While “korya taihen da” couldn’t possibly compare with the rhyme scheme of Disney’s

iconic “I’m late, I’m late… for a very important date,” a rabbit walking and talking with a

watch is nonetheless a peculiar thing for Alice to witness, and a glimpse into the many

strange wonders of the fushigi no kuni she will soon unwittingly stumble into. Interesting

to note as well are the parallels with traditional Japanese folk stories and this kind of

bipedal talking rabbit character. As I will show, the White Hare of Inaba (Inaba no

shirousagi) which also is referenced by introducing Carroll’s/Disney’s White Rabbit as

“ippiki no shirousagi”. offers a notable parallel.

26
Figure 3 Sculpture of the White Hare of Inaba at Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto. Okuninushi-
no-Mikoto was to the right, not pictured here.
The folk character of the White Hare of Inaba can be seen in shrines all across

Japan, especially in Kyoto (the old capital) and is usually accompanied by Okuni-nushi-

no-Mikoto, a god who helped the hare recover from wounds inflicted by crocodiles,

which he had deceived in an attempt to cross over to another island. Although

Wonderland is most certainly not a real location, nor is it based on one, Inaba by contrast

now exists as a part of Tottori Prefecture, though it is no longer referred to as Inaba. In

the 1952 Disney picture book version, references to the original White Hare of Inaba

abound: the White Rabbit is not only is referred to as shirousagi, but also crosses a river.

白うさぎは、小川をとびこすと大きな木のほらあなの中にとびこんで、見
えなくなりました。

Shirousagi wa, ogawa wo tobikosu to ookina ki no horaana no naka ni tobikonde,

mienakunarimashita.

27
 The White Rabbit, upon jumping over a stream, hopped into a hole in a large tree
and could not be seen.

While there are no crocodiles in either version, there is no river or stream in the Disney

animated film version of this scene. This leads me to believe that the creative addition to

this may have been included in reference to the Kojiki story of the White Hare and the

Crocodiles: children familiar with the latter story would find it easy to understand and

connect with this new character, whose only ostensible difference appears to be his

obsession with punctuality.

When Alice falls down the rabbit hole after the hare and finds herself in the

inverted world of Wonderland, she famously consumes the potion and cookies that

transform her size, enabling her to find the door to Wonderland in the first place. The

translation omits this. We do not even see the table with the key, cookies, potion, or Alice

reasoning through it all to find the small door; instead, the illustrations accompanying

those portions that describe her changing her size flash forward in time, so that she is

already in Wonderland among the rocking-horse flies. The actual transformation is not

part of the narrative in the translation. From this, we can surmise that, in the interest of

space, the publishers made a decision to simplify the narrative; perhaps they may have

also considered the puzzles Alice goes through to get to Wonderland not as interesting for

younger children as her actually being there, or even too complex for them to relate to.

Another interesting bit of description from these pages relates the changes Alice goes

through with obake, another aspect of Japanese folk culture, like the Hare of Inaba,

popular with children: “Suddenly, her height, she thought, grew tall like an obake, but

28
then, to the point that she was worried she would disappear, she shrank.”2 Obake, a word

which scholar Michael Dylan Foster in his book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese

Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai, citing a 1971 monograph on yōkai (or spirits) refers to

as “this nostalgic, dream-filled world” (without the pollution of urban cities,) includes

many different kinds of monsters, usually affixed to specific locales in Japan. In the

context of this Alice picture book passage, the rokurokubi comes to mind. As Foster

describes in a separate book called The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese

Folklore: “The rokurokubi appears as a normal woman whose head can become

completely detached from her body or, alternatively, remain attached by a long threadlike

neck. In either case, the head has the ability to fly around and act of its own accord”

(Foster 221). He goes on to explain that rokuro refers to a pulley, hence the idea of a

cable or rope-like neck. These kinds of references to Japanese folk culture ground

children in this potentially new story of Alice, making it easier for them to understand

and conceptualize her journey. While the image of the White Hare of Inaba and the

rokurokubi may not be at the forefront of the minds of children reading or parents reading

to them, on a subconscious level these kinds of associations may be made even without

conscious awareness of them.

2
“Kyuu ni, sei ga, obake no you ni takaku natta ka to omou to, kondo wa, Arisu no
karada ga, kiete shimau no de wa nai ka to, shinpai ni naru hodo, chiisaku nattari suru
no deshita.”
29
Figure 4 Side-by-side comparison of tall Alice in the 1952 Japanese Disney picture book and
Katsushika Hokusai's interpretation of a rokurokubi.

30
 After encountering some strange animals and finally catching up to the White

Rabbit she had chased down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, the tea party scene that

follows is remarkably brief, truncated to a single sentence: “Then, she entered the tea

party of the Mad Hatter and a crazy rabbit called the March Hare” (21).3 Essayist

Yoshiyuki Momma notes that for Japanese translators, as with Maruyama omitting

Alice’s internal monologue as Ai-chan falls down the rabbit hole, “[i]t was almost

impossible to translate Carroll’s jokes, puns, nonsense, and parodies. So in early editions,

some parts of the Alice books were omitted…” (Momma 316). It is possible that

translators encountered the same issue in the process of creating this edition in the early

1950s, hence the incredibly brief description equating to “a tea party happened with the

Mad Hatter and the March Hare” and nothing more. The illustration, as though to make

up for this lack of text, takes up the majority of the page. The depictions of the March

Hare and Hatter, in fact the entire tea party scene, also closely follow the Disney

animated versions of these characters, right down (up?) to the paper lanterns overhead.

Even after the release of the 1951 Disney animated film and this accompanying

picture book in Japan, translation of Alice continued. In 1961, Ema Shoko and illustrator

Taizo Iwai present another rather different Alice in terms of appearance: while she

maintains the ribbon in her hair from the Disney version, once again in the vein of Eikan

Maruyama’s illustrator and Yoshimura Tsubakihana we see an Alice with a short

hairstyle, as short hairstyles were popular among young girls in each of the time periods

mentioned in this chapter (1910s, 50s, and 60s) with slight variation. I have taken the

liberty of including the entire page Warren Weaver chose to analyze in his 1964 book

3
“Sorekara, kichigai boushiya-san to, sangatsu-usagi to iu kichigai usagi no, ocha no kai
no naka ni mo, hairimashita.”
31
Alice in Many Tongues, which is a linguistic exercise in exploring Alice translations not

only in Japanese, but also in Russian, German, Danish, French, and even Swahili; a near

exhaustive study of the intricacies of translating Carroll’s nonsense language and other

oddities into other languages. In exploring Japanese translation of Alice, Weaver chooses

to focus on what for him was a modern translation, that of Ema Shoko, and includes a

page he found interesting.

Although it is a rather awkward fragment, from this we can see that barely any

kanji are used. Save for Ou-sama (King) and hito (person); the rest is written entirely in

katakana and hiragana, the much simpler alphabets that are easier for children to read.

By the 1960s, we no longer see antiquated phrases like “no yau ni” for no you ni (used in

similes) or chiyan written in all capital (oomoji) katakana letters for -chan (as in Aichan,)

so a child in Japan today would likely have no issue reading Ema’s translation. What is

interesting in this passage, however, is the fact that the illustration does not seem to

exactly fit with the conversation in the text, which centers around a King (perhaps Ou-

sama here may also refer to the Red Queen) who is arguing with someone who says their

neck (kubi) has already been cut, whereas the King/Queen feels that since he is running

his mouth still, it must not have been. Clearly, the image of shorthaired 1960s Alice

carrying the flamingo she used to play crochet in the Red Queen’s garden does not match

the contents of the amusing dialogue, but had Weaver chosen to include the next page,

perhaps we would find a drawing of the Red Queen yelling at this character.

32
Figure 5 A page from the 1961 Ema Shoko translation, as illustrated by Taizo Iwai.
There is an interesting lack of kanji characters and Alice is once again sporting short hair.

33
 As a final comment, I find it interesting that the bulk of Ema’s translation, at least

on this page, consists of dialogue, whereas Carroll’s original was filled with remarkably

detailed descriptions of Alice’s and other character’s reactions and expressions, as well as

ever-present narration that guided the story. By contrast, in the style of a modern

Japanese novel (for example, the 2014 bestseller Tomorrow I Will Date Yesterday’s

You4,) there is a tendency to feature long conversations, jumping from character to

character without necessarily needing to indicate who is speaking at the time. This is

because character’s coded speech patterns (whether they are using “feminine” phrases

like ne or atashi or “masculine” ones like ore, boku, and yo) would naturally clue the

reader in on who is speaking. In the above passage, in fact, use of polite language (keigo)

in phrases like “shabette wa orimasu ga” (“I am speaking, but,”) and “dou ga gozaimasen”

(roughly, “I am not sure that it is in that way”) indicate that it is the King/Queen’s subject

speaking, and that this subject is addressing someone in a much higher position than

themselves. In contrast, the ruler merely responds with “Baka mono a!” (“You fool!”),

dispensing with politeness entirely. This 1960s Alice translation, by making use of

common conversational conventions in Japanese, is therefore rather close to what we

might come to expect of a modern, present-day Japanese translation of Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland.

Conclusion

While all of the translations analyzed in this chapter come from different modern

Japanese historical contexts, each presents its own take on Alice as a character: from

Maruyama’s 1910 Ai-chan to the 1911 illustrated Meiji Arisu, from the 1952 Disney

4
Boku wa ashita, kinou no kimi to deeto suru
34
picture book to Ema Shoko’s 1960s Alice, all four of these Alices can be thought of as

existing not as mere extensions of Carroll’s original Alice Liddell, but instead as

completely different characters. They are different not only in terms of appearance, but

also in the way that they behave and think, as supported by the word choice of the

translators. As will be explored later in the thesis, it was necessary for Japanese

translators to oversimplify or even omit certain very British terms and riddles that Carroll

employed to make them suitable for Japanese young readers, which I argue results in a

simplification of Alice’s overall character in the Japanese imaginary (as further supported

by my face-to-face surveys with Lolitas in Harajuku). However, and rather importantly, it

is not the case that this is a gross oversimplification, or that the essence of Carroll’s Alice

is lost in translation. Rather, I argue that she is transformed into a Meiji Arisu, a

Gothic/Noir Alice, and a Disney Alice, and each of these iterations is understood on its

own terms, as almost a separate entity from the original. It is clear from these translations

that Japan has a long and serious love story with Alice—but instead of being tied only to

Carroll’s original Alice or the Disney movies, the Japanese Alice functions as a fluid

concept that can take on many forms, and can even be male. In the next chapter, I explore

these alternative Alices as they appear in the world of manga.

35
 Chapter 2: Manga Alice and the Gothic

This chapter explores the alternative Alices found in Japanese manga, particularly

in shoujo manga with a volume of the 2008 series Alice in the Country of Hearts. As such,

I will first examine shoujo manga more broadly as a genre, including its relevant history.

Then I analyze a portion of Alice in the Country of Hearts to give an idea of its overall

style and this style’s roots in earlier shoujo manga. This will reveal one of the alternative

Alice types. Following the analysis of this example of shoujo manga, I will next move to

the slightly more recent (2010) manga Are You Alice? by Ikumi Katagiri and Ai

Ninomiya, which features a dark and gender-bent version of Alice. I conclude with an

exploration of the Gothic and its intersections with Alice. I believe that notions of the

Japanese Gothic help contribute to a kind of “Alice-esque” aesthetic found in Japanese

popular media, and thus the Japanese imaginary of Alice can be thought of as not just the

product of one character from the books of Lewis Carroll, but rather as the product of an

amalgam of different Alices and almost-Alices, most of which are not found in American

popular media.

The two Alice manga I focus on in this chapter cannot be discussed without first

analyzing the historical context and the typical characteristics of shoujo manga. Shoujo

literally means “girl,” so shoujo manga refers to comics produced specifically for girls to

read. To cite Kinko Ito’s article “A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture

and Society”:

Shojo manga… emerged in the 1960s. [The magazines] Shojo Furendo (“Girls’
Friend”) and Maagaretto (“Margaret”) began in 1963, and Shojo Komikku (“Girls’
Comics”) in 1968. These magazines and [the series] Nakayoshi (“Good Friends”)
came with supplements such as cards, stickers, and paper dolls, and they became
very popular among the girls who started to recognize that they were not just
children, but ‘girls.’ It was a time when the girls ‘started hating ugly stuff, boys,

36
 and dirty, violent things’ and collected ‘cute color pens, erasers, writing boards,
folders, pencil cases, notebooks, etc. (Evers 6).’” (469-470)

Manga thus becomes a site where very early on in life the division between danjou (men

and women) is made clear to Japanese boys and girls: the distinction lies in these kinds of

magazines, of which the male equivalent is shounen manga zines like Shonen Jump that

retain a wide readership today. It makes sense, given the revulsion girls begin to harbor

towards “ugly stuff, boys, and dirty, violent things,” that Alice’s story, with its

contrasting focus on more whimsical details like personified animals, tea parties, and its

very vague references to violence in the royal court, would make an ideal shoujo manga

story.

Before moving away from the topic of the shoujo genre and into an analysis of a

modern Alice manga, it is important to first identify the primary characteristics of shoujo

manga, which will also feature prominently in Alice in the Country of Hearts. These

characteristics come from the shoujo magazines of the prewar period of the 1910s to the

1920s that Mizuki Takahashi writes of in his chapter “Opening the Closed World of

Shōjo Manga”. These early magazines featured illustrations, like those of popular artist

Yumeji Takehisa, of “thin, frail-looking models with pale faces[…]” (117). Later

illustrators of the 40s and 50s, like Junichi Nakahara, updated this image. As Takahashi

notes, “The shōjo in Nakahara’s illustrations have stick-like bodies without

musculature… What distinguishes them from [earlier] depictions are their extremely

enlarged slanting eyes, thick black eyelids, and thick eyebrows. However, whereas before

the war these girls had gazed contemplatively upward, unconscious of those viewing

them, in the 1950s they began to address the viewer directly—as illustrated by means of

37
the light shining in their clear black eyes… Nakahara’s achievement was to use this light

to animate the previously doll-like shōjo” (120).

Indeed, the eyes become one of the most important distinguishing characteristics

of shoujo manga. This goes hand in hand with some of the other characteristic features of

the genre. As manga scholar Matt Thorn of Kyoto Seika University notes:

Casual, first-time browsers of shojo manga may find them bewildering. The page
layouts are dynamic and the backgrounds are often dominated by nebulous shapes
and patterns that would seem out of place in an expressionist painting. Yet for all
the visual cacophony (which is in fact quite structured and easily comprehended
by experienced readers), most of what is represented is conversation. This begins
to make sense once you realize that shojo manga are first and foremost about
interpersonal relationships, which are of course developed and maintained (or
ruined) primarily through conversations (44).

Shoujo manga like the 1970s classic Berusaiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles) match

Thorn’s description exactly. In The Rose of Versailles, protagonists Oscar and Marie

Antoinette (the latter based on the historical figure) have eyes that sparkle and are always

surrounded by background embellishments like flowers, such as the titular rose, which

contribute to the complexity of its page layouts. As Deborah Shamoon notes in her article

“Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shojo

Manga”, the series was “an instant hit among teenage girls in Japan from the moment it

first appeared in… Margaret in 1972. At a time when shojo manga was just beginning to

shift its demographic from elementary school students to high school students, [it] was

part of a larger trend toward longer and more complex storytelling in comics for girls”

(Shamoon 3). This “trend toward longer and more complex storytelling” clearly paves the

way for an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into manga

form, which is no doubt complex in that it features many characters and also the complex

dream world of Wonderland. Thus, it can be said that shoujo manga is comprised of the

38
following features, but of course need not contain them all: 1) enlarged, expressive, and

often sparkling eyes 2) dynamic and bewildering page layouts, intended to imitate the

flow of conversation 3) background elements like flowers, sparkles, and floating bubbles

and 4) a story that focuses on one or a few interpersonal relationship(s).

The Alice story appears uniquely suited to a shoujo manga adaptation due to its

very young protagonist whose age closely matches that of the intended readership, the

temporal complexities of Wonderland (evident in both of the manga discussed in this

chapter) that allow for the manga artist to utilize complex page layouts effectively, and

the web of relationships Alice develops with the characters she meets. Since Alice’s

feelings towards these characters are not described in very much depth in Carroll’s

original, there is also plenty of room for interpretation on the part of the manga artist. As

such, the approaches these artists take contrast sharply, with one manga featuring a web

of romantic entanglements with the Wonderland characters, and the other preferring to

create rivalries and toxic relationships. These are by no means the only two

interpretations, as evidenced by the wonderfully diverse array of Alice manga available

on the market today. However, in the interest of space, I will examine only these two

works, and in fact condense the analysis even further by focusing on just one or two

pages of each in detail.

Beginning with Alice in the Country of Hearts, illustrated by Soumei Hoshino

with a story by “QuinRose”, what is interesting is how quickly the story unfolds and

characters are introduced. In rapid-fire, Alice falls down the rabbit hole from her world to

Wonderland, and is made to stay in the latter world by a forced kiss from the “White

Rabbit,” transformed into the bespectacled white-haired man named “Peter White.” This

39
very clearly non-consensual kiss is the vehicle by which the potion from Carroll’s

original story is delivered, although she maintains her normal size. Soon after this

encounter she meets a host of other characters, including Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

(twin boys with matching military-style uniforms,) the March Hare (who has become

something of a mercenary knight), the Mad Hatter (renamed “Blood Dupre,” a mafia boss

who retains the hat of the original Hatter) and the clock tower owner “Julius Monrey,”

who seems to be an original character.

The rapid-fire clip at which Alice meets all of these characters is reminiscent of a

dating simulation or otome game, in which the protagonist meets all of her potential

matches generally in the course of a single day so that the player may begin making

decisions to get the desired relationship “ending” with one of these characters. These

games almost always feature “blank slate” female protagonists who are so neutral that

players can easily identify with them, and in fact can pretend to be in the game instead of

this character. This is aided by the fact that, as fellow UNC scholar Emily Taylor notes

in her article on dating-simulation games, “The main character, with whom the gamer is

meant to identify, rarely appears on the screen” (194). This is the case for both bishoujo

games, intended for men and featuring a blank slate male protagonist who can date many

female characters, and otome games, which are the reverse.5

Like the opening of an otome game, then, Alice in the Country of Hearts begins

with a bit of interaction between Alice and each of the characters that make up the

5
Interestingly, the Alice of the Country of Hearts series branches off into others in which
Alice spends more time with one character than the others, usually ending in a romantic
scene with them, such as a kiss. This is reminiscent of the endings in otome games.
40
Figure 6 Scene from the beginning of Alice in the Country of Hearts, Vol. 1 (2008) when Peter White whisks off
Alice to Wonderland. Art by Soumei Hoshino.

41
Wonderland “harem.” 6 The scene I am choosing to analyze for the purposes of this

chapter, however, comes from the very beginning, even before she meets the men of

Wonderland, in which she is spirited off to that destination in the arms of none other than

the White Rabbit, Peter White. As seen in this two-page spread, Alice awakens from her

nap to find, consistent with the original story, a White Rabbit in a vest. In the top

rightmost panel, there appears to be a round, circular shape that could be the rabbit’s

pocket watch, but it is not depicted in very much detail. Then Alice comes face-to-face

with the White Rabbit, but not in this bipedal rabbit form for very long. Unlike in the

original, the rabbit insists that she must come with him, which adds a very different

almost “damsel in distress” aspect to the story when she’s carried off to the rabbit hole

against her will on the next page. Rather than the transition to Wonderland being a matter

of naïve curiosity on her part, it is something that is happening to a passive shoujo Alice,

who cannot adequately defend herself from the rabbit. “Good grief, you’re hopeless,”

Peter White chides at the top of the next page.

The transformation is another interesting aspect of this scene. Unlike in a shoujo

manga like Sailor Moon, in which the transformation from regular girl to superheroine is

a very elaborate process and the addition of each individual part of the outfit, from the

tiara to the gloves and boots, is emphasized in detail, here the transformation from White

Rabbit to Peter White, rabbit to man, is as simple as the onomatopoeic phrase “fuwa”

written out in plain kana, indicating a shift from having the fluffy (fuwa fuwa) coat of a

6
I use the term harem here in the sense that the genre of this manga is shoujo and
“reverse harem,” in which one female protagonist has many male romantic interests. This
came after the original “harem style” in which the genders are flipped so that there is one
male protagonist surrounded by many female romantic interests, which is far more
common.

42
rabbit to human skin. However, it is possible that this disparity between the dramatic

Sailor Moon transformations and this one comes down to the gender of the characters

involved; after all, the appearance of the masked superhero Tuxedo Mask in Sailor Moon

is equally as simple, signaled by a simple rose, which he throws into the scene.

Looking at the most basic structural elements, we can see a couple of interesting

shoujo manga quirks visible on the page. For example, there are irregular panel shapes, as

with the diagonal panel in which Alice thinks that she is “probably dreaming again,” and

immediately following that panel (proceeding to the left, as it is manga) there is a

curiously empty one that contains only the White Rabbit’s dialogue, meant to catch the

reader by surprise with the introduction of another character, but not yet showing who is

speaking. This is similar to when the rabbit transforms into Peter White on the next page,

in that the transformation scene is yet another empty panel containing only the sound

effect “fuwa”. Besides these empty panels, there is also the characteristic shoujo manga

element of the san dan buchi nuki ga, a fancy phrase that amounts to “3-panel split

depiction.” This allows for the reader to see the entire bodies of Alice and Peter White as

they appear to “break out” of the panel, ideal for dramatizing this moment of him

suddenly carrying her off to Wonderland. It is interesting with this dynamic layout how

quickly this pivotal moment in the narrative seems to pass, as she is whisked off to

Wonderland, so too is the reader suddenly carried into a different world.

Speaking of other worlds, while Wonderland is certainly a bit darker in Alice in

the Country of Hearts, with a mafia character in the form of Blood Dupre and characters

wielding guns on occasion, it seems that Wonderland is changed the most dramatically in

the pages of another later manga, Ikumi Katagiri and Ai Ninomiya’s 2010 manga Are

43
You Alice?, which completely changes the atmosphere and rules of Wonderland, but yet

again personifies its cast of characters inspired by Carroll’s White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat,

and Mad Hatter. In a bold twist on the story, Alice is gender-swapped: although he

retains the blonde hair, his personality is quite different. Not only does he have a tough-

guy style of speech, but he also vehemently denies that he is Alice. From page 18 in a

conversation with the Cheshire Cat: “Sorry to break it to you, but I don’t got that sorta

name”, referring to the name “Alice”. By some stroke of fate, however, he has been

targeted as the next in a long line of “Alices” by the Queen of Hearts, who appears as

obsessed with games as she was in the books, except that this game is a little more violent,

and the gender of the Red Queen has also been swapped. Interestingly, the title of “Queen”

remains.

Overall, the story of Are You Alice? unsurprisingly concerns this male Alice’s

struggle with his identity, encounters with the terrifying silhouettes of the Alices that

came before him (who had also been tasked with the same mission of finding and killing

the White Rabbit,) and the disturbing reality that a little girl is constantly keeping a

terrifying black shapeless monster at bay by pretending to be Alice so that it does not go

on a killing rampage. Clearly this is a very dark version of Wonderland, which also

maintains a mafia atmosphere similar to Alice in the Country of Hearts with the presence

of guns and the mafia hitman persona of the Mad Hatter character. However, unlike Alice

in the Country of Hearts, Are You Alice? features Alice himself wielding a gun, which is

given to him by the Mad Hatter for the purpose of self-defense from the Alice silhouettes,

who relentlessly stalk him in the shadows. In contrast with Alice in the Country of Hearts,

as well, is the appearance of the “real” Alice at a few points in the manga, even including

44
her cat Dinah. One such scene comes at a critical moment, when the male Alice is faced

with the realization that this terrible black monster is about to harm the fake little girl

Alice, who is pretending to be the real Alice to save him and the rest of Wonderland’s

inhabitants from the monster’s wrath. Behind him, what appears to be Carroll’s Alice

appears, and begins explaining why it is that he can’t (and won’t) interfere with the

monster’s attack. Here, the use of darkness and shading is pronounced, even obscuring

the original Alice’s face from view. She catches him as he’s in the midst of aiming his

gun down at the monster; hence, the gun becomes the focal point at the centermost

section of the page. At a few points it’d be difficult to tell who is speaking, were it not for

the shapes of the speech bubbles: the white bubble is the male Alice’s thoughts, while the

lighter grey bubbles are the words of the original Alice who has appeared behind him.

The only bit of dialogue that seems more difficult to place occurs in the same

panel as the gun in the middle of the page. Although it is in the same typeface as the

probing philosophical statements of the original female Alice, it trails off with

uncertainty, and then the male protagonist Alice seems to pick up where he trailed off

with the word “then”. Equally confusing are the disembodied hands just below the panel

with the gun; since the male Alice is holding a gun already, it seems unlikely that they

would be his hands, leading me to believe that they are the female Alice’s hands as she

comes up from behind and places them on his shoulders. In any case, the scene appears to

make Carroll’s Alice out to be a villain, in that she is implying an inability on the part of

the male Alice to control his fate or intervene to save the little girl from the monster due

to his own selfish need to fulfill the role of Alice. The worlds of both Alice in the Country

45
Figure 7 Climactic scene from the ending of Are You Alice?, Vol. 1 in which the male Alice
protagonist receives a surprise visit from Carroll's Alice. Art by Ikumi Katagiri.

46
of Hearts and Are You Alice? have a darkness to them that is unexpected given the source

material of Carroll’s original book, and the fact that both chose to include references to

the mafia is an interesting coincidence, perhaps indicative of a larger trend in Japan

towards linking these two ideas (Wonderland and the mob) together, at least in manga.

It is most compelling, however, to think about these two recent Alice depictions

in the context of the Japanese Gothic, for which Tiffany Godoy and Ivan Vartanian’s

book Japanese Goth is a helpful resource. The book includes a variety of Japanese

Gothic pictures organized thematically, with a description for each theme. The most

relevant of these when thinking about the Alice manga would certainly be the section

entitled “In Wonderland,” which includes the following description:

As an archetype, Alice represents a young girl whose inquisitive nature leads her
down a rabbit hole, where she encounters talking animals and anthropomorphized
objects in a nonsense world. Amid absurdity, we are enticed by the duality of
sweetness that carries dark undertones. Similarly, there is also an awareness of the
more primal urges of children, as intimated by the term “Lolita,” which is used to
describe this type of dress in Japan, while also being an overt reference to the
temptress title character of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a man’s obsession
with a sexually precocious girl (44).

Although certainly Alice is considered a figure central to Lolita fashion, which will be

discussed further in Chapter 3: Being Alice, I would take issue with the idea that the term

Lolita used to describe the fashion comes directly from Nabokov’s novel and not through

some intermediary. In fact, according to a popular Lolita blog (“F Yeah Lolita”)

containing advice for conforming to the style, including posts delineating what those

wishing to wear Lolita ought not to do/wear/say, the name Lolita as applied to the fashion

trend does not come directly from Nabokov’s story of the same name. This author cites

47
Figure 8 Part of Shinji Wada's Alice parody manga Stumbling upon a
Cabbage Field, featuring one of the first uses of the term "lolicon". Scan
from 2013 blog post by Caro Dee.

48
“the 1974 shoujo manga Stumbling Upon a Cabbage Field, an Alice in Wonderland

parody. Already do we have Alice, the Lolita’s patron saint, being mingled with the word

‘Lolita’! After this first usage, in the late 70s and early 80s, ‘lolicon’, as it was then

shortened to, was used in reference to fan-favorite girly characters” (Caro Dee).7 The

blogger also includes a scanned page of this older Alice manga. Although it is rather

difficult to read the scan, the bottommost panel on the lefthand side does include this

reference to the term “lolicon,” as a young woman wearing seifuku (a sailor school

uniform) elbows the otaku type character in the face, shouting “Usotsuke! Roriita

conpurekkusu!” (“Liar! [You have a] Lolita complex!”) in response to something he’d

said about Lewis Carroll and Alice. Notice as well that on the left-hand side of this panel,

there is a description of what a Lolita complex is generally, suggesting that it was not a

widely used term at the time. Thus we can say, at least in this blogger’s fairly informed

opinion, that Lolita was initially referring to this Lolita complex, and so the 1990s

fashion was “not necessarily named by the people who were part of the subculture and

[use of the term “Lolita”] maybe [was] not intended to paint the most flattering picture.”

This, the blogger asserts, is very similar to what happened with the Goth and Punk

subcultures. Gothic Lolita is, however, its own beast, worthy of further discussion here to

conclude the chapter.

To move into this discussion of Gothic Lolita fashion as it relates to Alice in

Wonderland, then, it is important to consider what components make up this Gothic

Lolita fashion trend in particular, and to then locate these components in Alice in

Wonderland, whether in the form of Carroll’s original stories or the Japanese manga that

7
From the following post: http://fyeahlolita.blogspot.com/2013/11/why-is-lolita-called-
lolita-does-lolita.html
49
became a focus of this chapter. As characterized by Anne Peirson-Smith in her 2012

article “Do Gothic Lolitas Just Wanna Have Fun?: An Examination of the Goth-Loli

Style Tribes in Hong Kong and Tokyo”, the Gothic Lolita or “Goth Loli” is “a fandom…

[that] continues the Gothic preoccupation with clothes or costume in the search for self.

The ‘look’ then is depicted by a hyper-feminine take on the Victorian porcelain doll…”

(91). Although it is beyond the scope of this thesis, it would be interesting to explore

Alice as reflected in collectible and/or Victorian dolls as well, seeing as they are so

integral to the Goth Loli fandom as a whole.

Peirson-Smith goes on to discuss the connection between the Gothic Lolita style

and actual Gothic style. She asserts that “Goth Lolis continue the trend of utilising

familiar Gothic motifs—black clothes, crucifixes, coffins, bats, pale skin, and dark

looks—to signal and enact their identity in a liminal, performative and material manner,

whilst also reflecting the shadow-like aesthetics and sensibilities of a Gothic world…”

(92). Words cannot really do the look justice, so I have included here a scan of Alice as

she appears in one of the chapter pages for Alice in the Country of Hearts; her appearance

here coincidentally resembles a typical Gothic Lolita look. Although in most official art

for the manga Alice’s dress is blue with white accents, it is interesting that, due to it

being printed in monochrome, her dress occasionally takes on the look of a Gothic Lolita

coordinate (coord), or outfit, as described by Peirson-Smith and demonstrated on the next

page. (Coords and other variants of Lolita fashion besides the Gothic will be discussed

further in the next chapter.)

50
Figure 9 Chapter page art from Alice in the Country of Hearts, Vol. 1
(2008). The resemblance to Gothic Lolita dresses is uncanny. Art by
Soumei Hoshino.

51
 As we’ve explored in this chapter, Alice as interpreted by manga artists like

Soumei Hoshino and Ikumi Katagiri tends to be much darker, at least in recent years. I

am reminded here of the particularly dark Vocaloid8 song “Alice Human Sacrifice”, or

Hitobashira Arisu. Its accompanying video features a twisted dream that uses each of the

Vocaloid singers as its “Alice” to survive. However, each Alice eventually dies or is

murdered, “waking up” from the dream, and must be replaced. The song ends on an

ambiguous note, as it is unclear if the dream will take another successor after the twins

Rin and Len Kagamine, the last known Alices, wake up. In popular media like pop music

and manga, as well as the world of Gothic Lolita fashion, Japanese are exposed to the

darkness of Wonderland in a way that Americans, for the most part, are not.9 Perhaps the

clearest indication that Alice is viewed in such a multiplicity of ways in Japanese culture

is the fact that, in both Are You Alice? and “Alice Human Sacrifice,” there are many

Alices that come before the current Alice. Thus, it is readily accepted that Alice is not

just one set character from Lewis Carroll’s imagination, but also one that is subject to the

imaginations of many Japanese manga artists and youths, who can darken or lighten her

world as they see fit. In the next chapter, we will see how the meaning of Alice and her

story changes both in the hands of Japanese Lolitas and in the context of everyday life in

Japan.

8
Vocaloid refers to the use of synthetic voices to produce Japanese pop music. These
voices are also tied to an assortment of anime-style characters that have specific
associated hair colors and outfits. The most popular of these is Hatsune Miku, who found
global fame, particularly with her hologram concerts.
9
I find that the horror game “American McGee’s Alice” released in 2000 is the closest
we have come to this darker theme in the American popular conception of Alice.
52
 Chapter 3: Being Alice

A young woman is waiting for the traffic light to turn green on a busy street. She
is dressed in a white, long-sleeved, frilly blouse, a black pinafore dress trimmed
with white lace, black knee length socks, and a white pair of ‘Mary Jane’ shoes. A
lacy, white headdress adorns her delicately curled light brown hair, and her black
parasol trimmed with black ribbons protects her from the attack of the ultraviolet
rays, which threaten her pallid complexion. Although the girl appears to have
slipped out of Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, no one
around her seems to pay particular attention to her appearance. This is Harajuku,
an area known for its striking fashion in Japan.
- Masafumi Monden

Lolita fashion, as described briefly above by Japanese fashion scholar Masafumi

Monden, may turn heads in the United States or England, but it is very much an accepted

subculture in its original Tokyo context. Lolita is a difficult fashion trend to explain, but

with its Victorian ruffles and lace, cutesy accessories, and an entire community of those

practicing the fashion (also called “Lolitas”) it is certainly not stuck in the past. Various

types of Lolita fashion exist, among them what I call the foundational three: Sweet Lolita,

Gothic Lolita, and Classic Lolita. In terms of color palettes, Sweet Lolita tends to favor

pinks and blues with a smattering of sweet, girlish accessories. By contrast, Gothic (as

mentioned in the previous chapter) employs black and white with more minimal

accessories. Finally, Classic Lolita, almost as a rejection of both Sweet and Gothic styles,

stays closer to the Victorian theme, using beige, maroon, and other muted hues.

In this chapter, I will be exploring the concept of “being” Alice: the performance

of Alice that is not just limited to fashion choices and color palettes, but also comes in the

form of character goods (kyara guzzu) clipped onto bags and cell phones, and even

themed café experiences. These three types of performance (wearing fashion, purchasing

merchandise, and experiencing the café) enable Japanese fans to play with the concept of

Wonderland and the characters that live there in a way that enhances their daily life.

53
While these performances are certainly not limited to replications of Alice (which will

also be explored in this chapter) they are an interesting lens through which to examine

her and the nostalgic sense of childhood that she embodies. Not all interpretations of

Alice play into childhood innocence, of course. In quite the opposite way, many

interpretations of her hinge on a darker side (as mentioned in Chapter 2) that is a rejection

of the idealized childhood and is most clearly displayed by the Gosu Rori (Gothic Lolita)

subculture that will also be discussed in this chapter. We close with a discussion of

themed cafés, comparing the Alice café in Shibuya with the much more widely known

maid cafés scattered throughout the Tokyo district of Akihabara. All of these are the

ways in which I argue Alice is performed in Japanese daily life. To begin, however, I will

discuss the survey I conducted in and around Tokyo as a part of my research for this

project.

In the summer of 2016, while on a study abroad trip in Chiba, Japan (a prefecture

about twenty-minutes away from Tokyo by train) I had the opportunity to explore Lolita

fashion. The program included an intensive Japanese language course taught at a local

university. For our final class project, the nine of us were told to create our own surveys.

We were to ask random strangers our questions in Japanese, and then compile the results

into our own Japanese-langauge presentations to the class. For my survey, I chose to ask

a question that had appealed to me for some time, since before I traveled to Japan, and

something which Monden alludes to in the excerpt quoted at the beginning of this

chapter: What is the relationship between Alice imagery on Lolita dresses and the fashion

itself? I’d seen the Alice theme reappearing on Lolita dresses online, which led me to

believe it was a trending motif. We were instructed initially to only ask students at our

54
university (Kanda University of International Studies). But, after surveying six Kanda

students I found that Lolita fashion, while well known, was by no means popular in the

local area (students had Lolita friends, but were not Lolitas themselves.) I realized then

that if I were to learn about this fashion from its fans, I would need to go to the place at

the heart of the fashion: Harajuku, a Tokyo district often cited as the birthplace of Lolita,

among many other Japanese street fashions. I asked my Japanese professor if I could

continue my survey there, and she agreed that it would be a great idea and yield more

interesting results than if I confined myself to the Kanda campus. She warned me,

however, that discussions with strangers in Japanese are always tricky, and that I would

face resistance to very direct questions, especially in a Tokyo district as busy as Harajuku

on a weekend. Its famous street Takeshita Dōri is crowded with both tourists from around

the world and Japanese high schoolers, all looking to experience something a little out-of-

the-ordinary in its trendy boutiques and crepe stands. One hot Monday in July, on a rare

holiday from class, I took the train to Harajuku Station and stepped into that world for the

first time.

I soon learned that just being in Harajuku is no guarantee that Lolitas will appear,

however. In the street I could see plenty of other fashions represented, among them the

playful fairy kei and vintage.10 Clothing from the shop “Bubbles,” a store that specializes

in eclectic jewelry and pastel-colored, loose-fitting ensembles, is extremely popular.

While there is a small Harajuku location, a larger Bubbles shop is located on the top floor

of the 109 shopping mall in Shibuya, a neighboring district.

10
For examples of these other fashions, I encourage interested readers to visit
TokyoFashion.com, a blog uploading daily street snaps of Harajuku-ites and others
wearing street fashions like fairy kei, vintage, and Lolita.
55
Figure 10 Outside façade of the 109 shopping mall in Shibuya, often called "Marukyuu"
("Oh-nine").

109 is a looming eight-story building with floors consisting of purely women’s fashion

boutiques, connected by a long series of escalators. (109 Men’s is actually located just

across the street, featuring the male-focused fashion boutiques.) When I made it up to the

eighth floor of 109 and stepped inside Bubbles, my eyes felt a bit of a burning sensation,

since towards the back of the store the walls were a shocking pink. Bright fluorescent

lighting helped the dazzling array of necklaces and hair clips sparkle and pop, but store

models cautioned me against photographing the merchandise, afraid that I would share

the photos on social media. Nonetheless, they seemed thrilled to have a foreigner in the

shop. Here I was the one being surveyed: they had all sorts of questions about what I was

56
doing in Japan and whether I lived in Tokyo or not. Other potential buyers browsing

through the clothes and jewelry for sale were overwhelmingly young (roughly high-

school aged) girls with their mothers, both age groups drawn to and excitedly squealing

“Kawaii!” over the accessories.

Figure 11 The shop models of "Bubbles" posing with me in front of their store for a
photo.

There were also Victorian elements, like white chandeliers and a chaise lounge chair in

one corner. These Victorian elements perfectly fit the store’s youthful aesthetic. The most

interesting part by far was the neon light fixtures reminiscent of what you might find on

the outside of a bar or restaurant, in bright pink or yellow with the store name or other

cutesy phrases (“Cast a Spell” comes to mind.) The layout of the store was such that the

jewelry rack took center-stage, while the other skirts and tops were on racks off to the

side. This seemed to be a trend in boutiques throughout Tokyo.

57
 Later on in Harajuku, I recognized quite a few of the Bubbles necklaces with

English names like “Barbie” and “Jesus” on teenage girls strolling Takeshita Dōri. To

find Lolitas, I had to leave this street and go all the way to the basement-level boutiques

of Laforet, a large multi-story shopping mall similar to 109, but a little out-of-the-way

from both Takeshita Dōri and the train station.

The Lolitas I surveyed in Laforet were the shop models responsible for attracting

potential new Lolitas, enticing them to come into the store and buy a dress, or at least a

necklace. A Lolita dress is not a purchase to be taken lightly: most are upwards of 10,000

yen (roughly 100 U.S. dollars) and even those are basic dresses without the intricate

ruffled trims or built-in blouses that could double the price. Perhaps partly because I was

clearly not a customer looking to buy a dress and was not wearing Lolita myself, I found

that most of the models’ responses regarding Alice were very brief. They spoke with a

guarded politeness typical in conversations with strangers in Japanese. Even in the

written section of my survey that asked about the purpose of Alice designs in Lolita

dresses, one respondent simply wrote “Kawaisa” (cuteness). Those who did not see a

clear connection between Alice and Lolita also said so rather emphatically.

In fact, one striking similarity between some of the survey responses across the

board at both Kanda University and in Harajuku, besides a general trend refuting the idea

that Lolita fashion is currently popular in Japan, was this propensity to simplify Alice.

For example, when asked about the meaning of the Alice story, one common response

chosen by 45% of all respondents was “Nonsense and riddles,” another, chosen by only

about 13%, was “It’s just a children’s story.” While disheartening to think that a complex

character and story like Alice’s could be interpreted in this light, perhaps she is not any

58
less beloved by Japanese Lolitas and readers who share these kinds of sentiments. Those

that see her and her story as “just a children’s story” may not in fact believe that it is a

simpler story than what they might find in books and media targeted towards adults. As is

the case with many manga (comics) targeted towards boys and girls, the plot can be so

detailed and intricate that it even pulls in swathes of adult readers.11

As for Lolita’s popularity, currently I feel that other fashions besides Lolita are

coming more to the forefront, so that the former is struggling to maintain relevance. Of

course, there is a blurred line between what constitutes Lolita and what does not: for one

thing, during my survey I had the most perplexing time speaking with three individuals

outside the boutiques who I believed were Lolitas, but for whatever reason were adamant

that they weren’t. They told me that what they were wearing wasn’t Lolita at all, even

though it matched the appearance of most Lolita coords (outfits) I had seen before

coming to Japan and on the Lolitas I’d just met moments before in the Laforet boutiques.

Further blurring the lines, I frequently saw dresses matching the conventions for Lolita

dresses sold in shops alongside clothing from other, more forthcoming styles, especially

fairy-kei12 and (surprisingly) posh, luxury high-fashion. In one boutique on Takeshita

Dōri, I found a variety of Lolita dresses, but when I asked the shopkeeper if it was a

11
When a similar boom occurred in America in the early 1950s, as author and comic
book historian Paul Lopes writes in his book Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the
American Comic Book: “the very popularity of comic books among children and
adolescents proved to many [adults] the dangers of a popular entertainment they
considered lowbrow and of extremely poor quality. Critics accused comic books of
everything from damaging children’s eyesight to promoting juvenile delinquency”
(Lopes, x). This kind of stigma has only recently started in Japan with the influx of adult
manga collectors who dedicate their whole lives to reading and collecting volumes of
manga.
12
Fairy-kei uses pastel colors and accessories that borrow 80s pop culture iconography to
create eclectic outfits. For more, see this article:
http://www.miseducated.net/2010/04/fairy-kei-and-more-japanese-80s-revival-fashion/
59
Lolita shop, her response was, “Well, kind of.” Whether or not my respondents liked

Lolita fashion, everyone responded positively to Alice. They were overall bemused by

the idea that someone would not know who she is. Although I did not ask those I

interviewed if they thought wearing Lolita was like becoming Alice, I received mixed

responses to the idea of there being a connection (kankei in Japanese) between the

concept of Alice and the concept of Lolita. I think this is in part due to the wording of the

question: kankei ga aru is such a direct and affirmative statement in Japanese that even if

someone thought there was a relationship between two things, they might still shy away

from using it and instead say something like “It looks like something Alice might wear”

or “She influences the fashion” instead of “There is a connection” between the two.

After all, the idea that a Japanese street fashion subculture like Lolita is emulating

one particular character or motif, while not beyond the pale, might seem to be ignoring an

entire history of Japanese street fashions playing with many different ideas and characters

at once. As early as 1997, photographer Shoichi Aoki established FRUiTS, a fashion

magazine dedicated to collecting photographs of the street fashions in Harajuku popular

at the time. The following comes from the website of Powerhouse Museum in Sydney,

accompanying an exhibition of his photography:

Some of the many styles seen in FRUiTS include punk, cyber and decora, in
which simple garments are accessorised with toys and plastic jewellery that clink
together to add an aural dimension to dress. Clothing inspired by cartoon
characters like Sailor Moon are also popular. In the last couple of years ‘elegant
gothic Lolitas’ have had a strong presence in Japan. This style takes Harajuku’s
doll-like ‘Lolita’ look into a harder world of black lace crinolines, corsets and bat-
shaped handbags.

As mentioned here, characters besides Alice, like the beloved, world-renowned 1990s

anime character Sailor Moon, also feature prominently in Tokyo street fashions. Excerpts

60
from FRUiTS were adapted into two photobooks, one in 2001 by the same name, and

another in 2005 called Fresh FRUiTS. Both photobooks stay mostly true to the original

format of the magazine, the only exception being that they lack the advertisements to

popular Harajuku boutiques. The most interesting part about the FRUiTS books for me, a

part that stayed true to the original magazine, is the portion of the captions called “point

of the fashion.” Here the photographer asked his subjects what the point or purpose of

their outfit was, and the responses speak to the incredible diversity in intentionality even

in just one Tokyo district among those wearing popular street fashions. One of the

photographs I found particularly interesting has a caption that lists the “Point of the

fashion” as simply “Heidi”.

In the photograph, “Maya,” aged 17, sits on a curb. Behind her are the remnants

of various convenience store snacks. She sits with her hands folded over her knees,

covered by her long white dress. She wears sheer white socks and red sandals with straps,

just barely peeking out from the edge of the long dress. While the dress is relatively plain

on the bottom, the chest has an elaborate multi-colored embroidered design. The sleeves

of the dress are about ¾ length, and the cuffs are red and white plaid. Her hair and make-

up are perhaps the most interesting part of the entire ensemble: her dyed strawberry

blonde hair is accented by matching, almost fuzzy-looking hair extensions as well as

many strands of brightly-colored pink and white yarn knotted together that resemble

dreadlocks. Her make-up is applied sparingly, but her cheeks are heavy with red rouge,

perhaps contributing to the desired “Heidi” look. Through this look, Maya is becoming a

beloved children’s book character, but not in the form of something as directly

representational as cosplay, where the goal is to become an exact replica of the character

61
Figure 12 Heidi-inspired look from "FRUiTS". Photograph by Shoichi Aoki,
2001.

62
as he or she appears in some media, be it a video game, comic book, or a full-length film.

Instead, by combining these disparate elements (make-up, fuzzy hair extensions, plaid

shirt cuffs, and the red sandals over white socks) that do not alone conjure up Heidi, she

creates a unique Heidi look that would make someone think “Heidi” right away, even if

they did not know exactly why. Like Alice, Heidi inhabits a wonderland of her own

(although Heidi’s is in the Swiss Alps, a real location) and is called upon here in Maya’s

outfit as a familiar figure, already adapted to fit in with Japanese culture. In fact, I would

go so far as to argue that Japanese people like Maya are becoming these characters, at

least temporarily, through their fashion choices. The same way that Maya, with her plaid

shirt cuffs and white flowing dress, is embodying Alpine Heidi, Lolitas wearing elegant

dresses featuring Alice imagery and a blonde wig are embodying Alice in that moment,

albeit more subtly than someone wearing an Alice Halloween costume.

Another interesting dimension to the discussion of performance in street fashion

revolves around fashion subcultures. For Yuniya Kawamura, author of Fashioning

Japanese Subcultures, street fashion subcultures are a response to “a widespread feeling

of disillusionment, alienation, uncertainty, and anger” following “Japan’s economic

slowdown in the first decade of the twenty-first century.” The uncertainty and anger

stemming from this slowdown led to “the breakdown of traditional Japanese values, such

as perseverance, discipline, and belief in education—especially among children. Their

norm-breaking attitude is exhibited through their appearance, which is a way to make

themselves seen and heard” (Kawamura 27). The subcultures were once large and

conspicuous, but they have since splintered off into smaller groups like Gosu-Rori, or

Gothic Lolita.

63
 Popular Alice translator Yagawa Sumiko argues that today’s Gothic Lolitas are

regularly performing as Alice. According to Yagawa, Gothic Lolitas chafe against the

traditional values Kawamura mentions, as well as the idea that they must attend the best

schools, immediately find employment after graduating, then marry and have children, all

one after the other in orderly succession. Being Alice becomes a way for marginalized

Gothic Lolitas to resist these societal expectations. Echoing Yagawa's point of view,

Scholar Sean Somers, in his essay “Yagawa Sumiko’s Wonderland as Translation,

Theory, and Performance,” writes: “The Gosu-Rori subculture of Japan… seek an

invocation of Wonderland amid the quotidian aspects of Tokyo. For them, becoming

Arisu in the everyday means to overturn restrictions that have suppressed or abused the

individual personality” (Somers 200). In other words, by taking on this other persona in

the form of Alice, marginalized individuals can find empowerment. I tend to agree with

Somers’s perspective here, that those participating in fashion subcultures like Gothic

Lolita are rebelling against Japanese societal pressures to conform and perform well in

school and later in their careers, and instead performing literally as Alice. Being Alice

functions as a form of escapism, allowing young and middle-aged Japanese to avoid the

strong feelings of guilt and giri (obligation) to their parents, teachers, and the larger

society. Somers goes on, however, to make a point about how cuteness functions in

Yagawa’s discussion about Wonderland.

In a society inundated with imagery from Hello Kitty mobile phone straps and
other tokens of plastic prettiness, Yagawa [finds] a more complex understanding
of what constitutes the lovely or the grotesque. She sees in Wonderland an ethos
with deeper meanings than the cartoonish depictions of moe (Japanese slang:
fascination) or kawaii (cuteness) (Somers 201).

64
Although performance of Arisu is definitely intended to rebel against career, scholastic,

and familial pressures, based on my surveys in Harajuku I did find that kawaii sentiments

were not absent in all cases. Some Lolitas equate Arisu directly with kawaii and are not

ashamed of simplifying her in this way. To do so perhaps even gets at the heart of Lewis

Carroll’s intent with Alice, which may contrast with Yagawa’s intent in translating Alice:

that is, that Alice is first and foremost a children’s story, and an exploration of any deeper

concept second.13

Figure 13 Two women looking at an

Alice-themed fashion line through a
shop window in Harajuku, a few blocks
from Laforet where I conducted surveys
of Lolitas.

An interesting point of Yagawa’s in the above excerpt is the idea of those Hello

Kitty mobile phone straps and “other tokens of plastic prettiness,” which definitely

13
Worth noting here as well is the Tim Burton realization of Alice as a kind of feminist
hero in his recent film adaptations, who takes on the Jabberwocky while wearing a very
masculine suit of armor. These ideas were definitely Burton’s own, and certainly do not
feature in the Carroll original.
65
intersect with Alice in a way not mentioned in Somers’s essay: Alice, too, has become a

consumable symbol of kawaii like Hello Kitty. While in Japan, I was able to locate many

Alice-themed examples of what scholar Aviad E. Raz, author of Riding the Black Ship:

Japan and Tokyo Disneyland calls “Disney kitsch”, popular among Japanese OLs (office

ladies, who also have a particular identity in Japanese pop culture that Raz argues greatly

contrasts with the presence of such symbols of cuteness in their work spaces) and

schoolgirls (the expected consumers) alike.

Indeed, kawaii culture’s origins are rooted in the stylistic choices of young

Japanese girls. As Sharon Kinsella notes in her chapter “Cuties in Japan” from the book

Women, Media and Consumption in Japan: “The spread of cute-style handwriting was

one element of a broader shift in Japanese culture that took place between the mid-1960s

and the mid 1970s” (Kinsella 224). In fact, “[a]rguing against the common view that cute

handwriting was something young people had mimicked from lettering in comics,

[researcher] Yamane [Kazuma] furnishes evidence that in fact the craze for rounded

lettering predates its use in comics… he concludes that teenagers ‘spontaneously’

invented the new style” (Kinsella 222). From handwriting to fashion trends to cute

trinkets, as Yuniya Kawamura eloquently puts it, “High school girls in Tokyo are the key

to any trend” (27). Two relevant examples of this with regards to Alice come to mind in

particular: one being the Alice princess dress keychains on schoolgirls’ bags (which

actually serve the practical purpose of being cell phone screen-cleaners on the inside of

the dress) and the other being the elaborate Alice displays on the first floor of the

standalone Shibuya Disney store.

66
Figure 14 One of two Alice displays in the Shibuya Disney Store.
The sign reads: Shashin wo totte, otomodachi ni shea shiyou! #Arisu
in Wandaarando (Take a photo and share with your friends!
#AliceinWonderland)

Figure 15 The second of two Alice displays in the Shibuya Disney

Store. This display features decorative plastic cakes in a glass tray
and a variety of faux flowers and vines.

67
 Avid E. Raz writes of Disney goods in Japan, “Disney as kitsch is readily

assimilated into Japanese kitsch culture… Japan embraced the biggest piece of kitsch in

the West… broke off a chunk and brought it home to add to its collections” (Raz 173-4).

That chunk comes in the form of its two enormous Disney theme parks, Tokyo

Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea (the latter of which I visited last summer and highly

contributed to my impression of Alice as a part of Japanese popular culture) as well as

other stores selling Disney merchandise and goods. Kinsella also writes extensively of

Disney in her exploration of the Japanese cute aesthetic:

Disney had a big influence both on Japanese animation and comics and on the
introduction of the modern cute aesthetic into Japan. However, whereas Disney
cute was based more on a sentimental journey back into an idealised rural society
populated with happy little animals and rural characters taken from folk stories,
Japanese cute fashion became more concerned with a sentimental journey back
into an idealised childhood (Kinsella 241).

The idealized childhood is certainly present in the Alice narrative, but I would argue that

it is up to the performer (whether they be a Lolita, a schoolgirl, or a day pass holder at

Tokyo Disney) to decide to what degree, if at all, they (literally!) buy into this story.

As I viewed the two displays in the Shibuya Disney store, I started to see them as a kind

of moodboard showing the Japanese popular impression of Alice and her cuteness. She is

equal parts Victorian (seen in the decorative clocks and books) and cute (the teddy bear

and little plastic cakes). “Cute” foods like cakes in Japan also come with “a marketing

image, frequently something petite, frilly, and Victorianesque; rustic and olde worlde; or

derived from fairy-tale images scavenged from the nursery” (Kinsella 232). The

Victorianesque is also a theme in Lolita fashion, one that forms the basis of the Classic

style mentioned at the beginning of this chapter with its ruffles in muted or dark hues and

doll-like makeup and accessories.

68
 Figure 16 Although the Alice dresses are barely visible in the above image (on the
bottom-most row) they were just as common of an accessory on girls' bags.

Besides fashion and fashion subcultures, there is one more way that Japanese fans can

“be” Alice. Although I did not get a chance to visit it personally, Shibuya is the home of

Japan’s Alice themed café. At any themed café in Japan, visitors (not exclusive to

foreigners) can come in for (usually expensive) beverages and themed desserts while

experiencing what can feel like another world.14 The most common example that tourists

become quickly acquainted with if they visit Tokyo’s Akihabara district is the maid café:

although one could argue that you hear them before you ever see them. The maids from

maid cafés line the popular streets in Akihabara and call out to customers in squeaky

high-pitched voices, enticing them with their skimpy French maid costumes and glossy

14
I was ultimately able to have this kind of themed café experience at Kawaii Monster
Café in Harajuku.
69
menus showing many other similarly dressed girls. If you choose to follow one up to the

top floor of a tiny seven-story shell of a building, you’ll find a very different reality.

As Patrick Galbraith states in his essay on maid cafés “Maid in Japan: An

Ethnographic Account of Alternative Intimacy”: “One hallmark [of a maid café] is 'non-

ability' (hijitsuryoku), the aesthetic of innocence, inexperience and imperfection. Service

is taken to be personal, heartfelt and irreproducible.” While hijitsuryoku is a property

unique to the food served at a maid café, the high prices, and to some extent the

irreproducibility of that particular meal and experience, is a part of themed cafés overall.

These cafés are also always interested to know if it is a customer’s first time there, since

returning customers often hold membership cards or receive other special benefits, such

as discounts, at recurring visits. In terms of an experience, Galbraith concludes “the maid

café invites visitors to embrace, to become, the child.” While guests may not be catered

to in this intimate way at the Alice café, the experience of their visit on that particular day

is still irreproducible, and customers are still entering an entirely different world, the

world of Wonderland, which may make them feel like Alice (a child) as well.

As seen in this chapter, Alice not only exists as a character that one can become,

but also her world, Wonderland, can be visited and experienced through venues like

Disneyland and the themed café. While the intent of embodying Alice may have

something to do with escaping societal and familial pressures, it is more likely in my

view that the temptation to escape the boredom and tedium of daily life causes Japanese

young people in particular to turn to flashy fashions like Lolita and even cosplay as a

form of amusement. In the same way, schoolgirls (who perhaps cannot take the risk of

going to school in the latest Harajuku fashions) can become Alice in a subtle way through

70
merchandise sold at venues like the Disney Shibuya store and Tokyo Disneyland.

Clipping an Alice princess dress keychain onto your bag at the time may not feel like a

particularly heavy statement about you personally, but it is certainly not meaningless. It

establishes, through a tangible object, a connection between the wearer and the original

source material (in this case, Alice and her fushigi no kuni) and the significance there,

while not as drastic as Alice cosplay or an Alice-inspired Lolita outfit, still captures the

way Alice has become a part of Japanese popular culture.

71
 Conclusion: Alice Lives On

My research began with a very specific curiosity, and that was why Alice

characters and iconography appeared so frequently on Japanese Lolita dresses. From

there my interests broadened significantly, and I became interested not only in Alice in

Lolita fashion, but also Alice in Japanese popular culture. As a result, I have come to an

understanding that there exist many types of Alice in the Japanese popular imaginary, and

not all of them are in keeping with the American perception of her as a beloved Disney

princess. Upon examining translations and manga adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland into Japanese, I have found types that simply would not conjure up Alice for

most Americans, such as the short-haired Meiji Alice and the dark or noir Alice. What is

most significant about this finding in terms of the larger field of Japanese Studies is most

certainly the idea that a global phenomenon, such as Alice, can reveal the larger narrative

trends that exist in Japanese culture.

One such narrative is that of the male Alice, indicative of the strong presence of

gender-bending narratives in Japanese storytelling across time, and the dark, murderous

Alice seen in the same manga.15 The fact that Alice can be readily adapted to fit these

different narratives is also crucial, and shows that she can be understood as a global

phenomenon, which Warren Weaver also addressed with his 1964 book Alice in Many

Tongues. However, the cultural flow of Alice does not end with translation, but rather

continues in the form of merchandising (as with Disney,) cosplay, and even manga

adaptations, as explored in previous chapters. In addition to this critical insight, part of

15
Also worth mentioning here is Kanai Mieko’s short story “Rabbits”, a work that shows
how violence can function as part of a darker Japanese Alice type while also contributing
to the creepy-cute (kimokawaii) aesthetic.
72
the thesis (which I have appended) involved conducting brief surveys in Harajuku of

Lolita boutique shop models. They were asked to answer questions about the story of

Alice and the popularity of Lolita fashion as a whole. While the survey was initially

conducted to fulfill the requirements of an intensive Japanese language course, including

a presentation of the results given in Japanese, this project enabled me to see Harajuku

firsthand, having only read about the Tokyo district and its unique fashions prior to my

visit in the summer of 2016. Through this visit, I am now aware that, although popular

online blogs such as Tokyo Street Fashion persist, currently there is a demographic shift

underway resulting in a loss of youth fashion participants, and these participants are

increasingly vying for less hade (bold) fashions than Lolita or fairy kei. As this is a

tangential issue, I was unable to pursue it in very much depth, but Figure 11 in Chapter 3:

Being Alice should provide an idea of what is currently trendy in the world of Japanese

youth fashion today, as opposed to the Lolita looks popular in the early to mid 2000s.

For future research, I believe that a more focused study regarding the current

youth fashions of Japan is necessary in order to debunk the idea that Harajuku exists in a

time capsule, frozen towards the early to mid 2000s with styles such as Gothic Lolita on

full-display as they may have been in those days. From what I saw last summer, this

study should look at the fashion decisions of patrons at stores like Bubbles and Wego,

which appear to be more popular among the high school students of modern Tokyo, and

how groups of those wearing other fashions (such as Lolita) feel the fashion will either a)

continue alongside these newer fashions or b) fall out of favor and become phased out. In

particular, it may be interesting to, after interviewing and observing Bubbles or Wego

patrons and shop models, find and speak with someone like Naoto Hirooka, the founder

73
of popular Gothic Lolita brand h.NAOTO, and learn more about his reasons for closing

all of their Japanese storefronts, although a statement regarding the closures has been

released online and translated by the bloggers of TokyoStreetFashion.com.16 By taking

stock of the situation in Tokyo urban centers like Harajuku, Shibuya, and Nakano

Broadway, it may be possible to predict the future of Tokyo’s street fashions. These

findings would in turn lead to the creation of a reliable and up-to-date academic source

about the latest in Tokyo street fashion that takes into account a declining interest in

those fashions that have traditionally been the focus of scholars in the field of Japanese

Studies in the past, such as Lolita.17

My inability to go further in-depth regarding these newer fashions is of course

due to the fact that it is outside the focus of my research, which primarily concerns the

translation and adaptation of Alice into Japanese language and culture. There was no

room for me to pursue this discussion, which is, as I mentioned, worthy of its own paper.

In terms of other limitations, I was also self-restricted to a discussion of books, Japanese

manga, and fashions in my exploration of Alice. However, it is also worth noting that

Alice adaptation can and should occur outside the realm of just these three forms of

media, such as movies, video games, and television shows. I was able to allude to these

other media briefly throughout the thesis (such as in footnotes referencing the video game

American McGee’s Alice and the recent Disney live-action Alice movies produced by

16
http://tokyofashion.com/h-naoto-closing-all-stores-in-japan/
17
I should add that another indication that the more bold (hade) street fashions are seeing
a decline among Japanese youths is the recent (February 2017) end of the street fashion
photo magazine FRUiTS I had mentioned in Chapter 4, which, according to creator
Shoichi Aoki, was because “There were no more fashionable kids to photograph.” (from
an online article entitled “Emergency Cool-Kid Shortage Threatening the Globe” by
Véronique Hyland.)
74
Tim Burton, the latter of which saw popularity in Japan) but beyond this I was limited to

a discussion of only those media sources which fit within my chosen chapters. That being

said, there is room there for other scholars to contribute their own findings regarding

Alice in Japanese television and movies, which is an area that has not seen much

attention in a scholarly way beyond analysis of the Disney animated film release in 1951.

In a way, my thesis was also limited by the availability of print editions of translations in

nearby libraries. However, (and although unfortunately not all of the resources she was

kind enough to locate for me found their way into the finished thesis,) I am indebted to

Natsuko Sawaya of UNC Library East Asian Resources, who was instrumental to me in

eventually locating print editions of the texts I explored in Chapters 1 and 2, even

obtaining a number of these for future use by UNC students in the library’s collection.

For future research, I would be interested in conducting fieldwork exploring

today’s youth street fashions in Tokyo, but other projects more related to the study of

Western children’s literature in Japan have also occurred to me as possibilities, such as

study of Pippi Longstocking or Little Bo Peep in Japanese translation and manga, the

latter of which also intersects with Lolita fashion in a way similar to Alice. Study of these

characters would also prove useful to the field in providing additional contexts with

which we might begin to think about translation of Western children’s literature into

Japanese beyond the spectrum of Alices I found in my own research. These other

explorations could also be combined with examination of the characters’ appearances in

media like movies and television shows, should it prove to be difficult to find manga or

translated books.

75
 Overall, as a final reflection, I found that thinking about Alice through the new

lens provided by Japanese translators, illustrators, and manga artists over time has given

me a new appreciation for the timelessness and ease of translation of Lewis Carroll’s

story. While there are particular nuances that have proven difficult to capture in Japanese

(such as nonsense language,) there is a way that Japanese popular culture has carried

Alice as a character above and beyond into something entirely new and unexpected. Over

the course of the thesis, we have seen Alice transformed into an ideal shoujo heroine, a

young man struggling to find his way in the mafia hierarchy of a new Wonderland, the

Disney princess Americans know and love almost as much as Japanese do, and even the

print designs of a Lolita dress. There is therefore versatility to Carroll’s Alice that comes

as a surprise looking at the text of Carroll’s stories.

The surprise does not come from the fact that there is anything implausible about

Alice as a global icon, but more from the dense and riddle-laden language of Carroll

himself, which contrasts a bit with modern English and proves difficult for Japanese

translators, as Yoshiyuki Momma notes in his essay on translation of Alice stories.

However, Alice has a charm about her as she walks about Wonderland: she questions

what she sees and the strange rules of the world about her, and then accepts the answers

given with a bit of hesitation, and this, I feel, is a relatable state for adults and children

alike. In Japan, it is debatable whether basic foundational questions of the kind Alice asks

are raised at all, but given the recent nature of news coverage focused on difficult societal

problems such as burakku kigyou (black companies, infamous for refusing to document

or provide compensation for overtime work for employees,) I feel that this is a unique

time to be studying Alice and the new niche she has the potential to fill for Japanese

76
adults in the form of fashions and merchandise. I have only just scratched the surface of

the potential Alice brings to this rapidly changing nation, readying itself for the 2020

Tokyo Olympics, and surely there will be more to discuss as the fashions and society as a

whole changes thereafter.

77
 Appendices: Summer 2016 Chiba & Harajuku Survey
Samantha Johnson
Pardon me, I am an exchange student at Kanda University, and I am doing a survey for a
thesis. Would you mind answering survey questions?

1. Age:
A) ～２０ B）２１～２５ C) ２６～３０ D) ３１～

2. Sex:
A) Male B) Female C) Other

3. Do you know Lolita fashion?

A) Yes B）No（Proceed to Question #5）

4. If you know Lolita fashion, are you interested in it?

A) Yes, I wear it.
B) Yes, I am interested in it.
C) No, I am not really interested in it.

5. Do you think Lolita fashion is popular in Japan right now?

A) Yes B）No C) Don’t know

6. Do you know Alice from Alice in Wonderland?

A) Yes B）No（Proceed to Question #8）

7. If you know Alice, what do you think is the meaning of Alice’s story?
A) Nonsense and riddles B）It is just a children’s story C) I do not know D) Other:
__________________________

8. Do you have any friends who wear Lolita fashion?

A）Yes B）No （Proceed to Question #10)

9. If you have friends who wear Lolita, how old are those friends?
A) ～２０ B) ２１～２５ C）２６～３０ D) ３１～ E）Various ages

10. Do you think there is a connection between Alice and Lolita fashion?
A) Yes, I think so. B) No, I don’t really think so. C) Other: _______________________

11. Lately, when you see Lolita dresses, jumpskirts, etc., do Alice motifs often appear on
the prints?
A) Yes, I think they are appearing lately.
B) Yes, but I think they are rare.
C) No, I do not think they are appearing lately.
D) No, because I do not see Lolita dresses, I do not know.
(If you answered “No” to this question, this concludes the survey. Thank you very much.)

78
12. If you answered “Yes” to Question #11, what do you think is the purpose of these
kinds of Alice designs?
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿

79
 サマンサ・ジョンソン
すみません、私は神田大学の留学生で、論文のために調査をしています。アンケ
ートに答えて下さいませんか？

一 年齢：
B) ～２０ B）２１～２５ C) ２６～３０ D) ３１～

二 性別：
B) 男 B) 女 C）その他

三 ロリータファッションを知っていますか？
B) はい B）いいえ（五番に行って下さい）

四 もし知っていたら、ロリータファッションに興味がありますか？
D) はい、着ています。
E) はい、興味があります。
F) いいえ、別に興味がありません。

五 今ロリータファッションは日本で人気があると思いますか？
B) はい B）いいえ C) 分かりません

六 アリス・イン・ワンダーランドのアリスを知っていますか？
B) はい B）いいえ（八番に行って下さい）

七 もしアリスを知っていたら、アリスの話の意味は何だと思いますか？
B) ノンセンスと謎々 B）子供の話だけです。C) 分かりません D）その他：
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿

八 ロリータファッションを着ている友達がいますか？
A）はい B）いいえ （「いいえ」と答えた人は十番に行って下さい。）

九 もしロリータの服を着ている友達がいたら、その友達は何歳ですか？
B) ～２０ B) ２１～２５ C）２６～３０ D) ３１～ E）年齢は色々です。

十 アリスとロリータファッションは関係があると思いますか？
B) はい、そう思います。 B）いいえ、別にないと思います。 C）その他：＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿

十一 最近、ロリータドレスやジャンパースカートなどを見る時、プリントには
アリスのモチーフがよく出ていますか？
E) はい、最近出ていると思います。
F) はい、でもめずらしいと思います。

80
G) いいえ、最近あまり出ていないと思います。
H) いいえ、全然ロリータの服を見たことがないので、分かりません。
（「いいえ」と答えた人は終わります！どうもありがとうございました。）

十二 十一番に「はい」と言ったら、このようなアリスのデザインの目的は何だ
と思いますか？
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿

81
Kanda
1. Student #1
1) Age: ~20
2) Gender: Male
3) No, does not know Lolita fashion
4) Skip (doesn’t know Lolita)
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are ~20
10) No, no connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes Alice prints exist, but are rare
2. Student #2
1) Age: ~20
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, is interested in Lolita fashion
5) Does not know if Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are ~20
10) No, there is no connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, Alice prints appear frequently
3. Student #3
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) No, no interest in Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Just a children’s story
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are various ages
10) Yes, there is a connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, Alice prints appear frequently
4. Student #4
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, is interested in Lolita fashion
5) No, Lolita fashion is not popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita

82
 9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is a connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, Alice prints appear frequently
5. Student #5 (Actually not a student; it’s IES Staff Member)
1) Age: 31~
2) Gender: Male
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) No, is not interested in Lolita fashion
5) Does not know if Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is Other: The creativity of humans is the most important
thing
8) No, does not have friends who wear Lolita
9) Skip (does not have friends who wear Lolita)
10) Yes, there is a connection between Alice and Lolita
11) No, lately Alice has not appeared in prints
6. Student #6 (Actually not a student)
1) Age: 31~
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) No, is not interested in Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) No, does not have friends who wear Lolita
9) Skip (does not have friends who wear Lolita)
10) No, no connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints

HARAJUKU
1. Interviewee #1
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is a connection between Alice and Lolita
11) No, lately Alice has not appeared in prints
2. Interviewee #2
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion

83
 4) Yes, wears Lolita fasion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are various ages
10) Other: Alice is something like a fashion icon
11) No, lately Alice has not appeared in prints
3. Interviewee #3
1) Age: 26~30
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Does not know
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 26~30
10) No, there is no connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
4. Interviewee #4
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) No, Lolita fashion is not popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Does not know
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
5. Interviewee #5
1) Age: 26~30
2) Gender: Male
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, is interested in Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Just a children’s story
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) No, lately Alice has not appeared in prints
6. Interviewee #6
1) Age: 21~25

84
 2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Does not know
8) No, does not have friends who wear Lolita
9) Skip (does not have friends who wear Lolita)
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
7. Interviewee #7
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) No, Lolita fashion is not popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
8. Interviewee #8
1) Age: ~20
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Does not know if Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are ~20
10) No, there is no connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
9. Interviewee #9
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Just a children’s story
8) No, does not have friends who wear Lolita
9) Skip (does not have friends who wear Lolita)
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints

85
10. Interviewee #10
1) Age: 26~30
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Does not know
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 26~30
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
11. Interviewee #11
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is Other: Haven't thought about it before
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
12. Interviewee #12
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
13. Interviewee #13
1) Age: 31~
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, wears Lolita fashion
5) Yes, Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is nonsense & riddles
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25

86
 10) Connection between Alice and Lolita is Other: Half
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
14. Interviewee #14
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, is interested in Lolita fashion
5) Does not know if Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Does not know
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are various ages
10) No, there is no connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
15. Interviewee #15
1) Age: 21~25
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, is interested in Lolita fashion
5) Does not know if Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Does not know
8) No, does not have friends who wear Lolita
9) Skip (does not have friends who wear Lolita)
10) No, there is no connection between Alice and Lolita
11) Yes, lately Alice has appeared in prints
16. Interviewee #16
1) Age: 26~30
2) Gender: Female
3) Yes, knows Lolita fashion
4) Yes, is interested in Lolita fashion
5) Does not know if Lolita fashion is popular right now
6) Yes, knows Alice
7) Meaning of Alice story is: Does not know
8) Yes, has friends who wear Lolita
9) Friends who wear Lolita are 21~25
10) Yes, there is connection between Alice and Lolita
11) No, lately Alice has not appeared in prints

87
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