Eighty years ago this year, a stuffed bear was brought downstairs by a small English boy named Christopher Robin -- "bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head" -- to be introduced to the world in the first of two books starring the amiable, slow-witted creature. The world got one look at Winnie-the-Pooh and surrendered instantly. "Almost never," one reviewer wrote, "has there been so much funniness in a book."
By the time Pooh's creator, A.A. Milne, died in 1956, the bear and his friends had become household names throughout the English-speaking world, somewhat to Milne's chagrin (he aspired to be remembered as a more serious writer). How would he have felt if he could have peeked ahead another 50 years and seen how much farther their fame would spread?
There could hardly be two more dissimilar settings, for example, than "the green, hilly countryside" of 1920s' England where Pooh was born and the vast, bustling metropolis that is 21st-century Tokyo. Yet Pooh-san, as he is affectionately known here, appears to be just as comfortable in the frenzy of Harajuku's Kiddyland or at Tokyo Disneyland, where his "Hunny Hunt" ride is mobbed daily, as he was doing Nothing on a quiet morning in the Hundred Acre Wood.