Japan’s enduring fascination with Harry Potter has generated colossal box office receipts and book sales, and his very own theme park attraction.
This week his creator, JK Rowling, selected a remote island in southern Japan as the location for one of four international magic schools.
But now the quintessentially English adventure has been given a Japanese makeover, with the release of a series of manga renditions of Harry, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley et al.
The 13 characters, which include the headmaster of Hogwarts school, Albus Dumbledore, Professor Snape and Harry’s owl, Hedwig, were created by a Japanese design company in collaboration with the film studio Shochiku.
For now the illustrations, licensed by Warner Bros., will be sold only in Japan.
A collection of 13 plastic folders, each featuring a character on the front and designs from the four houses of Hogwarts on the back, went on sale online last month. Rubber rubber stamps, badges and key rings are due to be released soon.
The characters are given the usual manga treatment – lustrous hair, outsized eyes and tiny feet.
As Kotaku and others have noted, it probably won’t be long before there is clamour for a fully fledged manga series or, better still, an animated film.
The Harry Potter franchise continues to enjoy huge success in Japan, 15 years after the release of first movie, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The seven films in the series have grossed more than US$893m in the country and been seen in cinemas by more than 78 million people, while Philosopher’s Stone is the country’s fourth highest-grossing film of all time.
In 2007, Tokyo was chosen to host the world premiere of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, while The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, an attraction that opened at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka in July 2014, has been credited with bringing record numbers of visitors to the park.
The wizard’s arch nemesis has even been invoked in the country’s diplomacy. In 2014, Japan’s ambassador to Britain, Keiichi Hayasahi, likened China to Lord Voldermort during a row with Beijing over island territories and wartime history.
That was after his Chinese counterpart in London, Liu Xiaoming, had described Yasukuni, a controversial war shrine in Tokyo as “a kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of (Japan’s) soul”.
