HEIDI WAS JAPANESE

The Swiss Alps, as see through Japanese eyes.

When we visited a souvenir shop in Hokkaido this summer, I came across something that stopped me in my tracks.

A box of biscuits.

On it was a familiar little girl, standing against an Alpine landscape.

And underneath her:

“Heidi, a girl of the Hokkaido” in English, which somehow made the whole thing rather confusing.

Because Heidi is Swiss.

Isn't she?

The original Heidi was written by Swiss author Johanna Spyri in 1881. It tells the story of a young orphan girl who is sent to live with her rather grumpy grandfather in the Swiss Alps.

There are mountains.

There are goats.

There are meadows.

There is an elderly Swiss man with a beard.

Everything is reassuringly Swiss.

Except the version of Heidi that I grew up with.

That one was Japanese.

I just didn't know it.

Before television, the only way to experience Heidi was through the book.

Then, in 1974, a Japanese television series called Heidi, Girl of the Alps appeared.

It was directed by Isao Takahata, who would later become one of the co-founders of Studio Ghibli.

And Takahata did something rather extraordinary. He didn't simply sit in Japan and draw what he imagined Switzerland looked like.

He and his production team travelled to Switzerland. They visited places including Maienfeld, the setting of Spyri's original story, studied the landscape and observed rural life in considerable detail.

They took what they saw back to Japan and turned it into an animated series.

And the result was remarkably convincing.

At least to me.

Growing up in Switzerland, Heidi was a weekly fixture on television – although, ironically, the series was never broadcast by Swiss television. We had to resort to German TV instead.

I watched it as a child and never once thought:

Interesting Japanese interpretation of nineteenth-century Swiss rural life.

I simply thought:

This is Switzerland.

The mountains looked right.

The houses looked right.

The cows looked right.

Even the general sense that everyone lived in a picturesque Alpine village where nobody had heard of traffic jams looked right.

It felt completely authentic.

Until, years later, as a teenager, I happened to read an article in a teen magazine and discovered the shocking truth.

Heidi was Japanese.

At least the version of her that I was familiar with.

There are moments when your childhood worldview quietly collapses.

This was one of mine.

My initial reaction was probably something along the lines of:

What do you mean, Japanese?

Followed by:

But... it looks Swiss.

And then, after the shock wore off, something else:

Respect.

Because this was long before Japanese anime became a global cultural phenomenon.

Today, nobody would find it particularly surprising that Japanese animators could produce an internationally successful interpretation of a European story.

Back then, it was rather different.

And the remarkable thing is that the Japanese version didn't merely become popular abroad.

It became part of how Swiss people themselves remember Switzerland.

A current exhibition in Lausanne dedicated to Takahata's work explores precisely this strange cultural loop.

Swiss visitors can look at the drawings, animation cels and photographs and recognise their own country in them.

Except they are looking at Switzerland through Japanese eyes.

And perhaps that is why the series worked so well.

Takahata wasn't trying to reproduce Switzerland photographically. He was capturing an idea of Switzerland – the mountains, valleys, traditional farming and idyllic rural life that many Swiss people like to imagine they come from.

Which brings me back to that biscuit box in Hokkaido.

There was something rather satisfying about seeing Heidi being used to sell souvenirs in northern Japan.

Because, technically, she is Swiss.

The story is Swiss.

The author was Swiss.

The setting is Swiss.

But the version of Heidi that introduced millions of people to that Switzerland was created by a Japanese director who had travelled there, looked carefully, and then recreated it from memory.

So perhaps I was wrong all those years ago.

Heidi wasn't Swiss.

She was Japan's idea of Switzerland.

And somehow, growing up Swiss, I thought it was mine.