Political correctness comes to Toyland

A few weeks ago I posted an extract from Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, written in 1883.  I have since found details of a controversy which arose in Japan about this work.
 

Political correctness, or PC, has become increasingly important in many countries like my native Britain in recent years and decades.  It is basically an attempt to find an agreed way to talk about sensitive topics, such as race, disability, religion etc. in a way which will not cause offence.  To be politically correct, we have to avoid using discriminatory words.

 

That sounds reasonable, right?  But many people complain that we do this too much, that sometimes the media or others are too concerned to promote political correctness.  A popular phrase you will hear in Britain is, “It’s PC gone mad!” which means that someone is taking far too much care to be politically correct.

I’ll give you an example.  Every school in Britain will have a holiday on 25^th December because it is Christmas Day.  Yet some schools have changed the name of this holiday from “Christmas holiday” to “Winter festival holiday” or something similar.  This is done to avoid offending people who are not Christians.  Many parents, though, complained that this was “PC gone mad.”

So how does this relate to Pinocchio?  Well, there are two disabled characters in the story.  There is a blind cat and a lame fox.  The characters are portrayed very negatively.  They try to trick Pinocchio to steal his money and end the book as beggars. 

In the 1970s, the Japanese translation of The Adventures of Pinocchio was withdrawn by some publishers because the book was not seen as politically correct.  There were some discriminatory words: Blindness was translated as “mekura” (dark eyes) and lameness as “bikko” (lameness).  There was also concern that the book portrayed the disabled as evil, or as failures.

Later, the translation was revised.  “Mekura” was changed to “Me no warui” (bad eyes) and “bikko” was changed to “ashi no warui” (bad legs).  They decided not to change the story, and left the disabled characters as evil failures.

Did they make the right decision?  About the Japanese translations of blindness and lameness, I don’t know enough to say which translations are best.  But about not changing the story, for me they were right.  You shouldn’t change a classic story.  It is a historical document and an important clue as to how people thought at that time.  If we start to change these stories to make them more PC, then how do we know what the original author really thought? 

And also, after reading the English translation, I had the impression that the cat was not really blind, and the fox was not really lame.  I thought that they were pretending to be disabled in order to trick people and beg more effectively.  You see, people who aren’t disabled can be evil and failures too! 

Maybe it was all just PC gone mad...

 

Vocabulary:

a controversy – A major disagreement, with opinions divided.

to cause offence – To make someone angry or upset.

to be discriminatory – To treat a group of people differently from other people, in an unfair way.

 

to portray someone as (evil) – To make someone appear (evil).

to be withdrawn – To be removed.  If a book is withdrawn by the publishers then they will no longer make any more copies.