From what I gathered, it seems that Grimm's fairy tales were brought to Japan as late as 19th century. Is that correct?
And how much do we know exactly about this phenomenon? Who was the first publisher or translator of these tales? Were they instantly accepted or did it take some time? What are the most important milestones in Japan's acceptance of German fairy tales?
If you have any knowledge on European tales brought to Japan in general, that could be an interesting read too.
Thank you for your attention! (And my apologies in advance for any cases of slight miscommunication due to language barrier)
Ryoho Suga translated the full book version but some of the stories first made it over in English text books in the Meiji Period. There was a TV anime version called Gurimu Meisaku Gekijō in 1987-8 but of course there's no anime without Disney's influence.
From references alone Alice in Wonderland is the most popular European fairy story in Japan, first translated in 1912 with multiple popular versions in the 1920s. Hans Christian Anderson has also had a lot of anime adaptations, mostly in the 70s. Little Mermaid alone has at least five anime from both before and after the Disney version with an early one being Mahō no Mako-chan (1970) and the latest being Bubble (2022).
Even without state backed education reforms Japan was a ready market for fairy tales since print media and folk tale collecting had parrelel development in Japan and Western Europe before Grimm's tales was first published in 1812. Printed Fairy Tale collections may have been one of the few areas where Japan was technologically and culturally ahead of many European countries.
Yoshiko Noguchi has a lot of articles on Grimm's Fairy Tales but I can't read Japanese well enough for anything but the English abstracts. Basically they were brought in by the state for teaching morals to children following a British educational model.