Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  If one kind of show proved popular, Japanese programmers were not above retitling other serials to imply similarities that were not originally there, or even to accentuate a particular character. One of the first television import successes in Japan was The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954) also a Western, but with a focus on a dog rather than any of the inscrutable cowboys. Broadcast as Meiken RIN TIN TIN (“Famous Dog Rin Tin Tin”) on the commercial network NTV in November 1956, it achieved a peak 65.9-percent rating the following year, becoming the fourth most-watched programme on Japanese television in 1957.

  Before long, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was transformed into Police Dog KING in Japanese, and The Pursuers into Police Dog IVAN—it was, it seems, the dog that made the difference. The subtext was that the animals were the true stars and the humans merely an unwelcome supporting cast. Moreover, the assertion that Rin Tin Tin is already “famous” seems designed to suggest that Japanese viewers were missing out if they did not tune in. In order to imply a relationship, however tenuous, similar American shows were retitled: Lassie, as Meiken LASSIE (“Famous Dog Lassie,” 1957), Run, Joe, Run as Ganbare Meiken JOE (“Keep It Up, Famous Dog Joe,” 1977) and The Littlest Hobo as Meiken ROCKY (“Famous Dog Rocky,” 1980).

  The experience of emphasising animal images in selling to the Japanese did not escape the Japanese in considerations of selling animal images back to foreigners. If a locally made production was too ethnocentric, it was harder to sell in foreign markets. Ever since 1963, when Osamu Tezuka sold Astro Boy to the American network NBC, Japanese animators had actively searched for themes and characters that would be easier to sell to foreign markets because they were mukokuseiteki—“denationalized” (Chun, A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots?, p. 279). An exotic setting was fine for local color, and a new audio track could remove the language barrier, but if characters were still demonstrably Asian or white, each was likely to cause dissonance in the other’s market. Animal protagonists avoided this problem, as they were not racially distinctive. Tezuka, however, discovered a new problem: fourlegged animals were more expensive to animate than humanoid figures. Anthropomorphic animals, on the other hand, were both transnationally appealing and technically simpler to animate.

  Famous Animal Detectives

  Perhaps we can already see the potential for a “Sherlock Hound” in such tensions—a foreign detective, “denationalized” through the use of talking-animal imagery, and de-fanged through adaptation for the children’s market. It helps, too, if he is “famous”, like Rin Tin Tin or Lassie. Best of all if he is a “famous detective”.

  Several foreign TV show titles gained the prefix Tantei (“Detective”) or Shiritsu Tantei (“Private Eye”) on Japanese broadcast, but a handful acquired the conjoined prefix Meitantei beginning with Diamond / Call Mr D, broadcast in Japan as Meitantei DIAMOND (“Famous Detective Diamond”). This practice persists, with retitlings such as Barnaby Jones as Meitantei JONES (“Famous Detective Jones”), and Poirot as Meitantei POIROT (“Famous Detective Poirot”).

  By 1978, the media strands of anthropomorphic animals and “famous” detectives had joined to create a genre of animal sleuths. A rising star of detective fiction, Jirō Akagawa, began the genre with his novel Mikeneko HOLMES no Suiri (1978, “The Case of Holmes the Tortoiseshell Cat”), in which a bereaved pet investigates the murder of his detective owner. The story has spawned thirty-two sequels to date, along with fourteen compilations of short stories, and several other spin-offs, including a cat-autobiography and a TV movie. Determined to cash in, the novelist and anime screenwriter Masaki Tsuji published a pastiche in a similar vein: Meiken LUPIN no Meisuiri (1983, “The Famous Case of Lupin the Famous Dog”). Albeit less successful than Akagawa’s stories, the cases solved by Lupin the mongrel still ran to twelve volumes in the 1980s.

  But Tsuji was not the only figure to attempt to capitalize on the bestselling Mikeneko HOLMES series. The beginning of the 1980s was a fertile environment for pitches that mixed family pets and famous detectives. The cartoon world, where animals would not need to be trained, would seem like a logical place to achieve the best synergy.

  In November 1980, the animator Hayao Miyazaki attempted to gain the animation remake rights for the American anthropomorphic comic series Rowlf by Richard Corben, submitting a proposal for a feature-length cartoon in November 1980. Although nothing came of this, Miyazaki was instead soon working on a Japanese-Italian Sherlock Holmes coproduction that re-cast the characters as talking dogs.

  Considering the timing of the production, it seems likely that both Japanese and Italian collaborators first assumed that the works of Arthur Conan Doyle would be out of copyright, as Doyle had died in 1930, and Japanese law allowed, and still allows, for works to come out of copyright fifty years after the death of their originator. This does not appear to have troubled the producers in the early stages, and they were perhaps given a false confidence by the previous transnational success of a science fiction remake of Homer’s Odyssey.

  Producer Keishi Yamazaki reported that Ulysses 31, a Franco-Japanese coproduction, had been well received in Europe, and that his only complaint was that Japanese crew names were left off the credits. He does not appear to have considered that the Odyssey was conveniently out of copyright and hence unlikely to invite lawsuits from its original creator’s heirs. He may have also been spurred on by the recent success of the Spanish-Japanese coproduction Dogtanian and the Three Muskethounds (1981, Wanwan Sanjūshi, literally “Woof-Woof Three Musketeers”), although this, too, faced no copyright issues, being based on a book long in the public domain.

  Initial plans for a direct cartoon remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles were over-ruled, because the Italians feared it was too close to horror. Instead, writers were encouraged to keep to stories of simple larceny. Theft, however, was the issue at hand when the Conan Doyle estate protested at the use of material still in copyright. The estate appears to have first noticed Japanese infringements in 1981, with the broadcast of an unrelated cartoon, Lupin vs Holmes. It seems that the existence and potential illegality of Sherlock Hound only arose in the aftermath of the Lupin vs Holmes case, causing the production to be suspended when several episodes were already completed. A prolonged wrangle over ownership was patched up by the renaming of the characters in some territories, in particular in a feature edit of two early episodes, released in 1984. Miyazaki left the production during the hiatus, and instead directed his first feature anime, Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind (1984). Sherlock Hound’s later episodes were completed by a new director, Kyōsuke Mikuriya, and the series was subsequently broadcast around the world.

  Although most scripts were written by anime regulars, one episode was written by Toshirō Ishidō, a crime author and prominent Japanese Holmes expert, who pitched an idea in which Moriarty would steal the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, and the canine Holmes would seek the help of a famous Japanese author known to have been living in Edwardian London: Natsume Sōseki, famous in Japan as the author of I Am a Cat. It was a proposal that neatly brought the story of eminent, anthropomorphic Victorians full circle, although it faced opposition from participants who had never heard of Sōseki. The Italian producer Luciano Scafa resisted the idea until the Japanese producer Keishi Yamazaki suggested that he was only objecting because Holmes sought the help of an Asian. Scafa backed down, and the story went ahead as episode #19 (Terebi Anime Damashi, pp. 185-6).

  In the episode as broadcast outside Japan, however, the plot element is garbled: Sōseki’s name is mispronounced, and his knowledge of the Japanese parallels, to an infamous theft at Nagoya Castle by the samurai master-thief Ishikawa Goemon, is glossed over. European characters and themes can be sold to the Japanese if they are transformed into dogs, but there are still numerous linguistic and cultural difficulties in selling the Japanese to Europeans, whether as dogs or otherwise.

  Dreams of Dogs and Butterflies

  In a final coda, Jeremy Brett, who played the definitive H
olmes for BBC television in 1984–94, was dubbed into Japanese on NHK by the actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi. When Studio Ghibli required an actor to portray the tweedy, magisterial talking cat Baron in the anime Whisper of the Heart (1995), Tsuyuguchi was hired to provide the voice. Hence, in Whisper of the Heart in the original Japanese, the anthropomorphic cat Baron speaks with the voice of Sherlock Holmes. It is yet another strand in the odd alternate history of a foreign icon in Japan, in which a famous British detective has been slowly transformed, over decades of cross-media survival, from a magisterial, maverick London sleuth into a cartoon canine on primetime.

  Zhuangzi’s philosophical question on dreams and reality remains unanswerable, although his “butterfly” has undergone the oddest of transformations in Japan, emerging from its transnational chrysalis as an altogether different animal.

  Chapter 31

  A Study in Simulacra

  Jef Burnham

  A waste collector, retrieving a bin of discarded books from an alley one morning, tripped over the remains of a reality disfigured beyond recognition. It was the reality of a single fact rendered mercilessly untrue by some long-since fled assailant. Next to the remains, the word “simulacra” was scrawled on the pavement in the reality’s blood as the desperate, final act of one whose authenticity is quickly fading.

  The scene was cordoned off by the responding officers and a Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard (whose name has been omitted at the request of my editor) was brought in to investigate. No eyewitnesses were found and those living in the tenements overlooking the alley swore to having heard no screams as they had all been inside watching television. Unable to determine the reality’s identity and with no clues to go on save for that curious word, simulacra, the DI turned to an expert on the term simulacra: the late French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard.

  Baudrillard’s postmodern philosophical text, Simulacra and Simulation, seemed the most logical starting point, but the DI reached an impasse in this line of inquiry when he found himself unable to apply Baudrillard’s theories practically.

  Thereafter, upon the urging of his wife, the DI attempted to enlist the services of legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes, in the solution of this beguiling case. Neither Holmes nor Watson were to be found in any directory of persons living or deceased and he concluded that their whereabouts must have been withheld by certain government entities to ensure the privacy of the detective and his biographer. Much to his embarrassment, the DI subsequently learned that Sherlock Holmes was in fact a fictional character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Faced with a seemingly impossible case, the DI desperately turned to media representations of Sherlock Holmes for inspiration. He encountered Holmes outside of Doyle’s writings in numerous works of film and television. However, many of the texts in which Doyle’s characters were featured, especially those produced for television, did not focus exclusively on the great detective’s exploits. For instance, he discovered Holmes, Watson, or Moriarty appearing in such television programs as Saturday Night Live, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Animaniacs, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Muppets Tonight, and Remington Steele to name a diverse few.

  As a result, during the final stages of his investigation, the DI became fixated on a single episode of a 1980s children’s cartoon series, The Real Ghostbusters: “Elementary My Dear Winston.” With the aid of this unlikeliest of texts, he at last understood the practical applications of Baudrillard’s theories and came face-to-face with the true destructive nature of the media and the images it perpetuates. Through his association with “Elementary My Dear Winston,” the DI was finally able to solve the case, but not before being driven mad by what I can only describe as a paradox of perception. The murderer, he discovered, was none other than Sherlock Holmes himself, having transcended his fictional limitations through the process of hyperrealization. His ascendance would result in untold devastation.

  I will attempt to reconstruct the case as presented by the DI in his final report to Scotland Yard. And as you will see, our intrepid DI discovered that the world’s greatest detective has in fact perpetrated the world’s greatest crime: the murder of the whole of reality!

  I Ain’t ‘Fraid of No Holmes

  “Elementary My Dear Winston” opens on the waters off the isle of Manhattan. An ominous, glowing orb rockets through the water at surface level toward two elderly fishermen who have cast their lines off the end of a dock. When the orb reaches them, the skeletal “remains” of Professor Moriarty burst from the water. Upon learning that he has arrived in New York City, Moriarty calls forth his flesh and clothing as the fishermen flee in terror. Moriarty then summons the Hound of the Baskervilles to inform the beast that his trip from England has left him hungry for evil—a hunger which sends him on a rampage through New York City. The scene cuts to Holmes and Watson traveling down the wrong side of a busy New York street in a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century automobile. Holmes enjoys a pipe in the passenger seat as Watson weaves the vehicle in and out of traffic precariously before passing ethereally through a large truck.

  The viewer initially interprets this sequence to signify the arrival of Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty’s ghosts in Manhattan. This interpretation is contradicted, however, when it’s revealed that even in the world of The Real Ghostbusters, these characters originated as fictional creations of Arthur Conan Doyle. Therefore, it’s impossible for them to have become traditional ghosts, having never been alive. But if they’re not ghosts and they don’t possess corporeal forms, what are they? A clue to the solution of this particular puzzle lies in the animators’ depiction of Sherlock Holmes. Here, as in so many media texts, Holmes is characterized as tall and thin, with a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape. While this is indeed the prevailing image of Holmes in the media, it is not in keeping with the character as originally depicted in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.

  To understand the nature of this false image, we turn to Baudrillard’s definitions of simulation and simulacra. In Baudrillard’s writing, simulation is the selective imitation of a reality. Given that the perfect representation of one thing for another is a theoretical impossibility, simulations are at best partial representations, and are therefore separate from the realities they simulate. In this way, they are realities unto themselves yet falsehoods, in that they bear little or no resemblance to the realities they purportedly refer to. An excellent example of the non-referentiality of simulations is found in the close comparison of a painting to the prints of said painting found in a museum gift shop. Prints inevitably fail to represent every physical characteristic of the painting, including the artist’s individual brushstrokes, the three-dimensionality of successive layers of paint, the texture and composition of the original canvas, the precise shades of colors, and so on. Since the print does not accurately embody all physical traits of the original painting, the print is therefore a reality unto itself—albeit a false reality in that it does not accurately capture the painting it is intended to represent.

  When subsequent simulations reference previous simulations rather than the original reality, simulacra are created. Baudrillard described simulacra as orbitally recurring models. This would be like making prints of prints of a painting, or Xeroxes of Xeroxes. Each subsequent simulation is further from the truth and supports only the reality of the simulation. In this way, the Holmes depicted by the animators of The Real Ghostbusters—tall, thin, wearing a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape, with a calabash pipe hanging from his mouth—is part of the Holmes simulacrum. After all, it is a reflection of the media’s orbital simulation of Holmes, which is separate from the “real” Holmes of Doyle’s texts.

  Maybe Winston’s onto Something

  To begin with, the Holmes of Doyle’s stories did not wear a deerstalker cap, nor did he routinely wear a cape. These were inventions of Sidney Paget, illustrator of the Holmes stories for The Strand Magazine. The calabash pipe was an invention of those earliest performers to portray
Holmes on stage and screen, because it seems a calabash pipe is easier for actors to hold in their mouths than other pipes while performing stage business, due to its low center of gravity. In addition, most visual media texts featuring Holmes ignore the written character’s drug addiction completely, while a widespread, false perception persists that Holmes’s methods of sleuthing inspired the creation of forensic science, when precisely the opposite is true—a fact that Laura Snyder discusses at length in her essay, “Sherlock Holmes: Scientific Detective.” Furthermore, Doyle’s Holmes never uttered the phrase to which the title of the Ghostbusters episode alludes (“Elementary, my dear Watson”). Therefore, the media’s depiction of Sherlock Holmes is a reality unto itself, separate from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

  With this in mind, we return to the episode. Winston is the only member of the Ghostbusters to recognize the entities as Holmes and Watson upon their first encounter with the great detective and his biographer. Before divulging his conclusion to his more scientifically-minded colleagues, Winston consults an illustration of Holmes from his personal library for confirmation. Unsurprisingly, the illustration of Holmes, too, is in keeping with the Holmes simulacrum that saturates the media. So why is it that Winston makes this connection and not the others? Baudrillard asserts: “Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial” (p. 80).