ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the transcultural film adaptation of a classic German children’s book in wartime Japan. In June 1941, the Japanese film studio Nikkatsu announced the premiere of the movie A Loving Family featuring the violin prodigy Toyoda Kōji. According to the advertising campaign, director Sunohara Masahisa and his collaborators had adapted a popular “National Socialist family novel.” In truth, the film was based on the children’s book Die Familie Pfäffling (The Pfäffling Family, 1906), written some 20 years earlier during the Wilhelmine era by the renowned author Agnes Sapper. The novel about a poor family of musicians was arguably one of the most popular German-language children’s and youth stories of the twentieth century and was quickly translated into Japanese and many other languages. Against the background of an expanding cultural relationship between Japan and Germany during the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter explores the circumstances of the novel’s translation into Japanese and examines the subsequent screen adaptation, which led to one of the rare music-driven films of wartime Japan. In doing so, the questions of how the story was adapted for contemporary audiences, and how the adaptation project was received by film critics receive particular attention.
