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Full text and illustrations of 'Chibikuro Sanbo' are available online.

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The full text and story were made available online by Arudou Debito .

In the news...

Two articles were recently written in the LA Times and Chicago Tribune by Dan Wallace. The articles, "Once Shunned as Racist, Storybook Bestseller in Japan" (June 12, 2005) and "`Sambo' returns to bookracks in Japan" (June 13, 2005) mention the petition against the republication of the book.

Below is an excerpt from the "`Sambo' returns to bookracks in Japan" article by Wallace:

A writer's death can do wonders for pushing that back catalog. Less drastically, a few books acquire cachet by getting banned.

Which may help explain why a reissue of "Little Black Sambo," a turn-of-the-20th Century illustrated children's book with a reputation for racism, is back on the best-seller lists in Japan.

...

In April, Zuiunsha, a small Tokyo publisher, bet there was still a market for a book that had charmed Japanese youngsters who as adults were unable to find it for their children.

The market agreed. Zuiunsha reportedly has sold 95,000 copies in two months since offering "Chibikuro Sambo." Despite being a child's read at a thin 16 pages, "Sambo" is among the top five adult fiction best sellers at major Tokyo book chains.

"Some people buy it out of nostalgia," explained Tomio Inoue, Zuiunsha's president, who in picking up the rights gambled he wouldn't face a backlash for breaking the informal ban.

So far, "Sambo" has returned to shelves with few objections in a country where blacks are rare. There has been one complaint published in an English-language newspaper, written by a black resident in Japan. An online petition against the publisher garnered 262 signatures.

That is a far cry from 1988, when a mostly American campaign drove the book off Japanese shelves.

At that time, Japan's go-go economy was perceived to be a threat to the United States. Japanese leaders feared the book was adding a culture war to the trade disputes.

Kazuo Mori, a psychologist at Shinshu University in Nagano, said most Japanese were surprised to learn that "Little Black Sambo" had racist overtones.

"It never occurred to us," he said. "It was just a story."
...

"The Japanese people can be racist when it comes to Koreans living here," Mori said. "But racist against blacks?

"We have no experience in dealing with black people Where would we get it from?"