Little-known cultural phenomenon brought to life in documentary
A classic novel in Japan brings tourists to Flanders every year to celebrate a story the Flemish have never heard of
A dog's life
That is a common feeling among the people featured in the new documentary, Patrasche: A Dog of Flanders. Through interviews here and in Japan, film footage, biographical information and a delightful use of miniature toys, the film tells the strange and fascinating story of a cross-cultural phenomenon largely unknown in Flanders.
In 1874, British author Louise de La Ramée, under the pen name Ouida, published a sentimental short novel called A Dog of Flanders. Set in “a small village near Antwerp”, a boy named Nello saves a big dog that has collapsed after being forced to pull a heavy cart by its cruel owner.
Nello and the dog, Patrasche, become inseparable as they work for Nello’s kind old grandfather selling wares. The family is poor, but happy.
Nello is a budding artist, and his dream is to see the paintings by Ruben in the Antwerp Cathedral – but he cannot afford the entrance fee. Endless tragedies strike and, eventually – freezing, alone and penniless in a snowy Flemish winter – Nello and Patrasche die in the cathedral in front of Rubens’ “The Descent from the Cross”.
Crossing the waters
The book was published in the UK and the US, and a Japanese businessman sent it to his homeland to be published there, too. So began a powerful and unparalleled obsession with Flanders by an outside culture.
The book became a bestseller and a literary classic in Japan – it continues to be taught in secondary schools. In 1975, a Japanese studio produced a year-long animated series, which aired every Sunday night. More than 30 million Japanese tuned in for the harrowing final episode.
You’d be hard pressed to find a Japanese person who has never heard of A Dog of Flanders. And you’d be just as hard pressed to find a Flemish person who has.
They created 52 episodes from this tiny book of 65 pages, and it’s a world that is so Japanese!
This is what so interested Flemish artists and filmmakers Didier Volckaert and An van. Dienderen. He having grown up seeing Japanese anime on French TV and she with a PhD in anthropology, they became fascinated by the cultural implications of the Dog of Flanders phenomenon.
“I’m very interested in topics like migration, colonisation and cultural identity,” van. Dienderen tells me from the couple’s home in Ghent. “In terms of documentaries, I really appreciate the fact that we can link urban legends or anecdotes to these larger issues.” The more they delved into the story, the more links they found between disparate peoples and countries.
Van. Dienderen likens it to opening different drawers in a big “stuffed cupboard” and finding more and more pieces to the same story. “There are so many funny and weird aspects to it,” she says.
It does indeed get weirder. Japanese tourists flock to the Antwerp Cathedral and burst into tears in front of Ruben’s painting where Nello and Patrasche died. They also have a hard time understanding why Flanders doesn’t resemble the land in their 1975 animation film and why there is no reference to A Dog of Flanders in Antwerp.
Merchandising galore
By contrast, the biggest metro station in Tokyo, where 2.8 million people pass by every day, houses a shop of the animation company that made the Japanese film. “Half of it is devoted to A Dog of Flanders,” says van. Dienderen. “Toys and cookies and gum and pencils and everything.”
For Japanese tourists in Flanders, “it’s really so disappointing,” she explains. “They are moved by being in the cathedral, but then there is nothing that goes beyond that.”
Well, there are a couple of things, actually, as the films shows – though they have only served to confuse the Japanese. After some research, Corteel, who still works for Antwerp tourism, decided that the original book A Dog of Flanders was probably set in Hoboken. In the mid 1980s, the city began producing Nello and Patrasche chocolates and put up a statue in the middle of a busy street. Willy Vandersteen, the famous creator of the Suske en Wiske cartoon strip, devoted an entire album to the story.
The Japanese came to Hoboken. They immediately hated the statue.
“He looks so unhappy, so thin and miserable,” says Naoko Miyashita, who runs the Belgian tourist office in Tokyo. “In the cartoon, Nello always had a round, happy face.”
Nothing to do with Flanders
They were also offended by the Japanese stereotypes in Vandersteen’s comic. “Once again, we had fallen in their estimation,” sighs Corteel.
The documentary Patrasche is full of such wonderful and often hilarious anecdotes, but it’s the exploration of images and legend that make the film so intensely interesting. The Flemish people cannot get the myth-building around A Dog of Flanders right because the story really has nothing at all to do with Flanders.
Americans have made five film versions of A Dog of Flanders. All but one changed the ending to a happier one for Nello and Patrasche. The Japanese version, meanwhile, paints a picture of Flanders that much more resembles the Netherlands – cartoon windmills, tulips and wooden shoes fill the screen.
They see many values in the story that we don’t identify with
“The Americans transform the ending and make it very religious. It says more about America than it says about Flanders,” explains van. Dienderen. “With the Japanese, it’s the same. They created 52 episodes from this tiny book of 65 pages, and it’s a world that is so Japanese! Ninety-nine percent of their film is not real; they are imaginary images of Flemish people.”
The same is true for the original book. Ouida only spent a day in Antwerp but certainly formed a clear opinion: “Flanders is not a lovely land, and around the berg of Rubens it is perhaps least lovely of all,” she writes.
The author was an animal rights activist and was shocked to find dogs working – pulling carts for their human masters. “He had been born to no other heritage than those of pain and toil,” she writes about the dog Patrasche. “And why not? It was a Christian country, and Patrasche was but a dog.”
Again, notes van. Dienderen, “it says more about the British view on Flemish people than about Flemish people at that time”.
The hero archetype
But it’s the Japanese that really capture the imagination in the documentary. “They see many values in the story that we don’t identify with,” says van. Dienderen. “For them, it’s more important how you die than how you achieve a goal. Nello is dying in a very noble way with a smile on his face.”
This resembles the construction of the hero myth in Japan, as evidenced by revealing interviews. “Winning isn’t the only important thing in life,” says Miyashita. “Sometimes you should lose.”
Patrasche: A Dog of Flanders plays this month in Antwerp, and a companion exhibition is on show at UGC Antwerp through 7 January. The filmmakers are planning a new Dutch translation of the novel. (The Dutch translations from the 1980s are out of print.)
But they hope that Antwerp will create something more permanent to represent A Dog of Flanders. “There is resistance towards this book and towards meeting the expectations of others,” says van. Dienderen. “But we’re talking about millions and millions of people who know this story about Flanders. There should be some respect toward the Japanese concerning their depth of feelings about this story.”
Patrasche: A Dog of Flanders premieres at 20.00 on 11 December in UGC Antwerp and then enjoys eight screenings inside the Antwerp Cathedral through 6 January. In February, it will show in Brussels’ Beursschouwburg as part of the venue’s DocHouse series.
Photo: Japan’s version of A Dog of Flanders, wooden clogs and all
