The history of Sherlock Holmes in Japan goes back to 1894, when a Japanese summary translation of The Man with the Twisted Lip by Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was published in the January issue of Nippon-jin. It was originally published in English in the Strand Magazine in 1891.
A few years later in April 1899, the Mainichi Shimbun, a major national newspaper, began a three-month series featuring an anonymous adaptation of A Study in Scarlet.
However, the first complete Japanese translation of a Homles story, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was published in another newspaper in 1899 and the first book length translation in 1907.
Ever since, Holmes has been massively popular in Japan. Adaptations, pastiches, parodies, manga, anime, TV dramas and a large number of research papers on Holmes and Victorian society and culture have been produced.
Papers in Japanese include, for example, The London of Natsume Soseki and Holmes, A Comparative Study of Japanese Translation Techniques in Holmes Stories, The Influences of Holmes Stories on Japanese Mysteries and many others.
Other British mystery and detective writers including Agatha Christie (1890-1976), have been and continue to be popular in Japan but none seem to have had the impact as Holmes or generated as many studies and spin-offs.
The only comparable character from a book by a British author is probably Lewis Carroll’s (1832-1898) Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was published in English in 1865, before the very first Holmes story, which first appeared in print in 1887.
