Making me happy in yesterday’s mail was this book:

This is a 1976 Japanese paperback translation of the book adaptation of Charlie Brown’s All-Stars. Now, while the English version is one of my favorite adaptation (as it has original Charles Schulz art) ,this book shouldn’t make me too happy. After all, I already had a Japanese edition of Charlie Brown’s All-Stars:

This 1971 edition has it all over the 1976. It’s in hardcover, it has wider pages so it can put Schulz’s drawings each on a single page rather than splitting them up across two pages, it has a different Japanese translation (okay, I have no way of judging which one is a better translation), and most importantly it has the text in both Japanese and English, so if civilization falls and lies fallow for a century or two, this book could serve as the Rosetta stone for future researchers trying to understand our language.

So why does the newer edition make me extra happy? It’s not because of what it is, but because of what it portends. If you look close to the top of the cover, you’ll see that on the left, it has a little THE MOVIE BOOK emblem, as if this was part of a line of such books:

…and over the right, there’s the number 8, as if this were part of a sizable series. If there’s a whole series of these books, then it seems to me that there’s a mighty good chance that somewhere out there, just waiting for me to find it, is a Japanese book adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas!

Now, in all my book-adaptations-of-A-Charlie-Brown-Christmas collecting madness, I’ve never actually come across as foreign language edition… and Japan would not have been my first hope. After all, the religious background of Christmas isn’t a central theme in a land where a fraction of a percent of the populace identifies as Christian. But it may be that their madness for Peanuts overshadows that.

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