To its defenders, Sambo is heroic and the story a harmless fantasy. "The little boy faces dangerous situations, but he manages to escape every time by his quick thinking," Japanese publisher Inoue says. "Sambo was small but smart."
Bannerman did not retain the copyright to her work, which she had illustrated herself, and in subsequent editions other artists were commissioned, most portraying Sambo with the exaggerated lips and simpleton look that critics found cartoonish and derogatory. (It has never been definitively explained why artists opted for African characters to illustrate a story set in India.)
After World War II, as the West became more racially sensitive, Bannerman's book ran afoul of the NAACP and other campaigners who pointed out that Sambo had been a racist epithet for blacks since the mid-18th century.
The book was banned in many U.S. schools, and by the 1960s had been chased out of most libraries and gradually disappeared from bookstores. Recent editions with different titles and illustrations are available online.
But a Sambo boom was on in postwar Japan. The prestigious Iwanami Publishing Co. issued a version of Bannerman's story, using Dobias' drawings that had been done in the 1920s for an American edition. Although there were as many as 40 other Japanese editions, the Iwanami version became the most popular, reportedly selling as many as 1.2 million copies.
The Japanese read it at bedtime and they read it at school. And the Dobias drawings were a hit in a country that loves animated characters with garish features, from the futuristic Pokemon crew to the stylized, frightening children with ballooning heads drawn by pop artist Yoshitomo Nara.
"The Japanese people can be racist when it comes to Koreans living here -- it's well known," said psychologist Mori. "But racist against blacks?
"We have no experience in dealing with black people," he continued. "Where would we get it from?"
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Special correspondent Naoko Nishiwaki contributed to this report.
