Lafcadio Hearn's Japan: Fascinating Stories and Essays by Japan's Most Famous Foreign Observer

By Lafcadio Hearn and Donald Richie

This collection of writings from Lafcaido Hern paints a rare and fascinating picture of pre-modern Japan

Over a century after his death, author, translator, and educator Lafcaido Hearn remains one of the best-known Westerners ever to make Japan his home. Almost more Japanese than the Japanese--"to think with their thoughts" was his aim--his prolific writings on things Japanese were instrumental in introducing Japanese culture to the West.

In this masterful anthology, Donald Richie shows that Hearn was first and foremost a reliable and enthusiastic observer, who faithfully recorded a detailed account of the people, customs, and culture of late nineteen-century Japan. Opening and closing with excerpts from Hearn's final books, Richie's astute selection from among "over 4,000 printed pages" not including correspondence and other writing, also reveals Hearn's later, more sober and reflective attitudes to the things that he observed and wrote about.

Part One, "The Land," chronicles Hearn's early years when he wrote primarily about the appearance of his adopted home. Part Two, "The People," records the author's later years when he came to terms with the Japanese themselves. In this anthology, Richie, more gifted in capturing the essence of a person on the page than any other foreign writer living in Japan, has picked out the best of Hearn's evocations.

Select writings include:

• The Chief City of the Province of the Gods
• Three Popular Ballads
• In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts
• Bits of Life and Death
• A Street Singer
• Kimiko
• On A Bridge

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Release date: Apr 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462900107

Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn, also called Koizumi Yakumo, was best known for his books about Japan. He wrote several collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, including Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

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Books to Span the East and West

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Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.

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Copyright © 2022, 1997 by Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co., Inc.

Copyright ©1997 Donald Richie (Text Only)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

First edition, 1997

LCC Card No. 96060931

ISBN: 978-4-8053-1714-3; ISBN: 978-1-4629-0010-7 (ebook)

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

part one : The Land

Strangeness and Charm

The Chief City of the Province of the Gods

In a Japanese Garden

Three Popular Ballads

In the Cave of the Children’s Ghosts

A Letter from Japan

Hōrai

part two : The People

Bits of Life and Death

Of Women’s Hair

A Street Singer

Kimiko

Yuko: A Reminiscence

On a Bridge

The Case of O-Dai

Drifting

Diplomacy

A Passional Karma

Survivals

Notes

Chronology

Glossary

Bibliography

Foreword

by Steve Kemme

After a long, uneventful voyage across the Pacific Ocean, the steamship Absynnia sailed into the Bay of Japan on April 12, 1890, and approached the city of Yokohama. Lafcadio Hearn stood on its deck and gazed in wonder at majestic, snow-capped Mount Fuji looming in the distance, appearing to float magically above the horizon. This breathtaking, dream-like image filled him with joy. The 39-year-old writer couldn’t wait to step onto the shore of this Asian nation he had wanted to visit for so long.

Hearn wasted no time getting acquainted with Japan. He spent the entire next day riding all over the city in a rickshaw, a small two-wheeled carriage pulled by a man on foot who wore straw sandals and a white, wide-brimmed hat. They stopped at Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples and countless little shops. Hearn was totally enchanted by his first taste of this exotic new world that had been open to foreigners for fewer than 40 years. The publisher Harper & Brothers had sent Hearn to Japan to write a series of magazine stories and to collect enough material for a book. Western nations were anxious to learn about this country that had shut itself off from the rest of the world from 1636 to 1853.

Hearn expected to stay in Japan no longer than a year. He wound up staying for the rest of his life. From 1890 to his death in 1904 at the age of 54, Hearn wrote more than a dozen books and countless magazine articles about his adopted country. He established himself as a distinctive prose stylist and skillful storyteller whose work helped the West understand Japan better than almost any other English-language author of his time.

This reissue of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan, first published by Tuttle Publishing in 1997, contains a strong, representative selection of his work including one of his most famous essays, In a Japanese Garden. Hearn had an uncanny ability to use a common feature of everyday life to illuminate Japanese traditions and culture. In this piece about his gardens, he describes how the small trees, plants and tiny pond enrich his life, and then he broadens his perspective to examine what the traditional Japanese garden means to the country. He muses about the connection between nature and the spiritual. Japan’s gardens and its display of flowers, he believes, show a respect for and sensitivity to the natural world. He contrasts it with the Westerners’ penchant for making flowers into bouquets, which he calls a vulgar murdering of flowers, an outrage upon the color-sense, a brutality, an abomination. Never one to mince words, he denounces Westerners as savages.

The Chief City of the Province of the Gods is Hearn’s beautifully written account of a day in Matsue, a city in the southwestern part of the country along the Sea of Japan, where Hearn lived happily for a year. Still clinging to its pre-Meiji ways, Matsue had been only mildly affected by modern influences. It embodied the Old Japan Hearn loved, still steeped in the ancient traditions and ways. In this and other essays in this book, Hearn uses his narrative skills to recount local folklore and mythical stories passed down through the generations.

In an essay written near the end of his life, Strangeness and Charm, Hearn writes about his changing perspective of Japanese character and culture. The initial rapture he felt when he first came to Japan made him feel as if he were in an exotic fairyland of friendly, polite people with quaint, charming customs. But he soon realized it would take years for a foreigner like him to grasp the depth and complexity of the Japanese people. It was a challenge he fully embraced. By immersing himself completely in Japanese life, Hearn developed a broad and nuanced understanding of the country. He deepened his knowledge of Japan through his teaching career, his family life, his travel throughout the country and his study of Buddhism.

But Hearn almost ruined his opportunity to write about Japan before he even started. When Hearn arrived in Japan, he was brooding about what he considered unfair treatment by Henry Alden, the highly respected editor of Harper’s Magazine, which had published stories Hearn wrote about Martinique while he lived on that Caribbean island from 1887 to 1889. He was angry at Alden for a host of reasons. He didn’t like the editing of his stories for the magazine. He felt Alden had failed to show sufficient concern for him when he became seriously ill in Martinique, and he fumed over Alden’s refusal to give him a contract or advances for his Japan and West Indies projects. When Hearn discovered that C.D. Weldon, the illustrator Harper’s had sent to Japan with him, would be paid more per page than he would, he exploded. He wrote a series of letters to Alden, each one nastier than the last. Alden, who understood Hearn’s irascible temperament all too well, tried to mollify him. But Hearn was not to be pacified. In his last letter to Alden, he said he wanted nothing more to do with him or Harper’s. Please understand, Hearn wrote, that your resentment has for me less than the value of a bottled fart, and your bank-account less consequence than a wooden shithouse struck by lightning. So Hearn now was without an income or friends in a country whose language he didn’t understand. But he wouldn’t easily give up his dream of exploring Japan. He had been interested in Asian culture for decades.

Hearn was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lafkada and raised by his great-aunt in Dublin, Ireland. She provided him with a good private-school education, but didn’t have the money to send him to a university. After spending a year idle, Hearn was abruptly dispatched to Cincinnati, Ohio, by his great-aunt’s financial manager to find work. The manager had relatives there who were supposed to help Hearn. The 19-year-old Hearn wanted to be a writer. After two years of working for printers, he landed a job at the Cincinnati Enquirer daily newspaper, launching his writing career. He brought a literary style to newspaper writing and became known for graphic, lurid crime stories.

His interest in Asian culture may have been piqued in Cincinnati, where he saw and admired Japanese art and Chinese pottery at special exhibits. He moved to New Orleans in 1877 for a warmer climate and fresh writing topics. In 1885, while working as a writer for the New Orleans Times-Democrat, he viewed and wrote glowingly about the large Japanese exhibit at the World’s Industrial & Cotton Centennial Exposition. He was so enamored with it that he revisited it many times, writing that a week’s study is not too much to devote to this department.

Now that Hearn had made it to Japan, he couldn’t tolerate leaving it when he had barely begun his work there. He wrote a letter to Basil Chamberlain, who taught Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University and was among most respected Japanophiles of his day, asking him to help him find full-time employment. Hearn had met Chamberlain shortly after arriving in Japan. With Chamberlain’s help, Hearn was hired as an English teacher at the Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School in Matsue. In its quest to compete in the modern world, Japan encouraged the teaching of English in its schools.

Being a teacher provided Hearn not only with a steady income, but also gave him an opportunity to learn about the nation’s customs and attitudes from his students and their families. This was the first of several teaching positions that culminated in his appointment as an English literature professor at Tokyo Imperial University. For the rest of his life, Hearn taught full-time while writing magazine articles and books about Japan.

He surely realized that by teaching students to write English, he was contributing to the Westernization of a country he wanted to remain faithful to its traditional customs and culture. But while instructing them in the beauty of the poetry of Tennyson, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, Hearn also encouraged them to appreciate their own culture. He presented a sharp contrast to many Western teachers who alienated their Japanese students by their condescending attitude toward their host country. Hearn took a personal interest in his students’ education. He made such a strong impression in his year in Matsue that just before he left to move to Kumamoto, the town honored him with an elaborate banquet. The more I have learned to know the hearts of Japanese students, a deeply touched Hearn told them, the more I have learned to love their country. On the morning Hearn and his family were to leave, about 200 students and some teachers gathered in front of his house and escorted him to the wharf near the long white bridge where his steamer awaited. Other students, students’ parents, friends, merchants and townspeople already were standing at the wharf to bid him farewell. Eleven years later, when Hearn resigned from Tokyo Imperial University because of a salary dispute, his students lobbied for his reinstatement at a higher salary and threatened to stage a public protest. Hearn dissuaded taking any action that might cause them trouble. He took a professorship at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he worked until his death in 1904.

Throughout his 14 years in the country, Hearn tried to become as Japanese as any foreigner possibly could. After recovering from an illness shortly after arriving in Matsue, Hearn decided he needed the companionship and care of a wife. A friend negotiated with 22-year-old Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a former Samurai warrior, and they married in January 1891. Hearn took the name Yakumo Koizumi and willingly assumed financial responsibility for Setsu, her parents, her grandparents and the family servants, all of whom lived with them. The destruction of the feudal system had ended her family’s source of income. Like other Samurai families, they had no skills for earning a living in the Meiji Era. Hearn was especially fond of her grandfather, who had once served as a tutor in the family of the lord of the castle in Matsue.

Hearn wore Western clothes at school but changed into traditional Japanese garb at home. He found a loose-fitting kimono and sandals much more comfortable than his shirts, trousers and hard-leather shoes. Hearn bought a long Japanese pipe and would smoke it sitting cross-legged on the floor. He even agreed to allow Setsu’s father to try to teach him how to shoot a bow and arrow. The Samurai bow stood about nine feet high and required much strength and skill to shoot accurately. With the bottom of the bow resting on the ground, the shooter would grip the lower part of the bow, aim and shoot. After struggling through a few lessons, Hearn gave up, fearing he might accidentally kill somebody.

Despite a language barrier, Hearn and Setsu grew into a loving relationship. Although they knew only a smidgen of the other’s language, they he and Setsu, developed their own special baby-talk communication that utilized Japanese and English words. Hearn’s Japanese friends facetiously called it the Hearnian dialect. Since his arrival in Japan, Hearn encouraged people to tell him ancient Japanese folk tales and legends. Now Setsu became his prime source of these tales of the supernatural or ghost stories. He also encouraged his students to tell him Japanese folk tales. Using the bare details of these stories, Hearn fleshed them out and wrote the stories in his own literary style. These stories formed a major part of his literary legacy.

He and Setsu had four children. Hearn relished fatherhood and was a loving and, at times, an overly anxious parent. When he began having heart problems in 1996 and feared he didn’t have long to live, he drove himself harder than ever to produce income-generating books. He even became a Japanese citizen so that his family would inherit his estate. But giving up his foreign status caused Tokyo Imperial University, which paid foreign professors more than native professors, to reduce his salary, leading to his resignation. Hearn accepted it as a price he had to pay for his family’s security.

Besides learning about Japan through his everyday interaction with his students, his fellow teachers and his family, Hearn traveled extensively within Japan. During the summer of 1892, Hearn and Setsu took a long vacation that included Kyoto, Osaka, Nara and Kobe and ended in a trip to the Oki Islands, an archipelago in the Sea of Japan, about 100 miles from the coast of Izumo, the province of Matsue. Of its 16 islands, only four were permanently habitable. The sparsely populated Oki Islands were one of the most remote and least visited parts of Japan, features that made them especially appealing to Hearn. Few residents there had ever seen a Westerner. They gathered outside his hotel so they could see him when he came out. They even formed a line up the hotel stairs in order to look at him in his second-story room.

For family vacations, Hern rejected more established, modern resorts and decided on a small fishing village called Yaidzu on Suruga Bay, about 120 miles southwest of Tokyo. Hearn, Setsu, their two sons and a nurse traveled by rickshaw. He and his family were the only tourists in the village. They rented four rooms above a fish shop from its owner Yamaguchi Otokiochi. Despite the flies, the mosquitoes and the foul smells of fish entrails from the shop, Hearn loved staying there. Otokochi’s wife cooked meals for the Hearns, and their children played with Kazuo. The beach consisted of mostly pebbles, but the cool, clear water was ideal for swimming. A sturdy sea wall protected the village from being slammed by high waves. Hearn impressed the village residents with his vigorous swimming style and with the way he floated on the water with ease. When the surf was running high, sometimes Hearn sat on the seawall for hours watching the waves crash against the lower part of the wall. Hearn returned to Yaidzu year after year. It reminded him of Matsue, a town he would have moved back to if he could have supported his large family on the teaching salary there.

Hearn willingly endured whatever hardships travel entailed to gain more insights into his adopted country. He braved a two-hour trip in a small boat in treacherous waters to see a sacred sea cave where children’s ghosts were said to build mounds of stones at night in homage to Jizo, the gentle and smiling Buddhist god who protects children’s souls. In 1896, despite health issues, the 46-year-old Hearn climbed to the 12,500-foot summit of Mount Fuji.

Hearn believed he could learn more about Japan from the common people than from the educated. It didn’t matter to him where they ranked in social standing. When he heard about a community of rag-pickers who lived in a hollow along the hills at the southern end of Matsue. The rest of society shunned them. For centuries, they had been treated as social pariahs. In Hearn’s time, hardly anyone ever visited them. But Hearn, always sympathetic to society’s outcasts, persuaded a Japanese friend to accompany him to the rag-pickers’ community. In feudal times, Samurai and aristocratic families had paid them to perform songs and dances no one else knew and that had been passed down in their families for generations. The rag-pickers were wary of Hearn at first. But after they became convinced of his sincere interest in them and their culture, a group of young singers and dancers performed for him more than an hour. Hearn felt honored by their graciousness toward him and thoroughly enjoyed the performance.

For his entire life, Hearn loved folklore and myths. He wrote down lyrics of the songs of African-Americans in Cincinnati, the Creoles in New Orleans and the blacks of St. Pierre, Martinique. At Hearn’s urging, the students took on a project of gathering songs they heard on the streets sung by washerman, carpenters, blacksmiths, bamboo-weavers, rice cleaners and other common people. The students collected 47 songs and helped Hearn translate the lyrics into English. Hearn wrote an essay about these songs called Out of the Street, which appears in his book, Gleanings in the Buddha-fields. As his students were collecting the songs, one of his students said he assumed Hearn didn’t want them to include the less refined or vulgar song lyrics written in the language of the common people. But Hearn told him those were exactly what he wanted. The real art of them, in short, is their absolute artlessness, he writes. That was why I wanted them. Springing straight from the heart of the eternal youth of the race, these little gushes of song, like the untaught poetry of every people, utter what belongs to all human experience rather than to the limited life of a class or a time; and even in their melodies still resound the fresh and powerful pulsings of their primal source. Hearn sensed the presence of the universal human spirit in those songs just as he had years ago in the songs of the black dockworkers on the Cincinnati riverfront and of the women washing clothes in the Roxelane River in St. Pierre, Martinique.

Hearn’s desire to understand the Japanese soul led him to explore and experience Buddhism. Raised Catholic in Ireland, young Hearn rejected the wrathful Christian God of his upbringing and became an agnostic. Yet his religious skepticism didn’t extinguish his quest for the spiritual. In New Orleans, he began reading about Buddhism and Shinto, Japan’s ancient nature religion that, to some extent, became absorbed into Buddhism. Although he couldn’t accept intellectually every aspect of Shinto and Buddhism, Eastern religious thought touched him emotionally in a way that Christianity did not.

Since his years in Cincinnati years, Hearn had embraced 19th Century philosopher British Herbert Spencer’s theory of the evolution of all life forms, particularly the human race’s continual progress toward perfection. Hearn saw striking similarities to Spencer in Buddhism. It seemed to Hearn that Buddhists’ profound reverence for their ancestors and the knowledge passed down from one generation to the next meshed with Spencer’s view of human spiritual and intellectual advancement. Although Hearn didn’t necessarily believe in reincarnation, he did feel strongly that the human race progressed by building upon the achievements and knowledge of previous generations and upholding the virtues that had sustained them. He found the Buddhist gods much more friendly and welcoming than the Christian God he had been introduced to.

In Japan, he learned about Shinto and Buddhism primarily by visiting shrines and temples, talking with priests and observing worshippers. Here I am in the land of Dreams—surrounded by strange Gods, he wrote in an April 25, 1890, letter to his Cincinnati friend Henry Watkin. I seem to have known and loved them before somewhere: I burn incense before them. I pass much of my time in the temples, trying to see into the heart of this mysterious people.

A young attendant who spoke English guided Hearn through one of the first Buddhist temples after arriving in Japan. Hearn insisted on making a small offering to the shrine of Buddha even though the attendant told him he didn’t have to do it. The attendant asked Hearn why he made the offering if he wasn’t a Buddhist. I revere the beauty of his teaching, and the faith of those who follow it, Hearn replied.

One year, Hearn and his family were vacationing in Yaidzu during the Bon Odori, the Japanese Buddhist festival honoring the spirits of dead ancestors. On the night of the festival’s last day, the villagers would launch dozens of lit paper lanterns on miniature model boats into Sugura Bay from the shore, symbolic of the journey of their ancestors’ spirits back to their resting place in the sea. Hearn assumed the launching would occur at midnight, as it did in most Japanese villages. But when he woke up just before midnight from his evening nap, he looked out the window and saw a swarm of tiny points of light moving out into the sea. He wanted to get a closer look at them. He ran to the beach and plunged into the water. With strong, swift strokes, he caught up with the last few lanterns. He swam close to one without disturbing its course so that he could study it.

I watched those frail glowing shapes drifting through the night, he writes in the At Yaidzu chapter of In Ghostly Japan, and ever as they drifted scattering, under impulse of wind and wave, more and more widely apart. Each, with its quiver of color, seemed a life afraid—trembling on the blind current that was bearing it into the outer blackness…. Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and dimmer sea, and ever separating further and further one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colors, must melt forever into the colorless Void….¹ He swam back to the shore and was greeted by Otokichi and his wife, who had worried that he might not make it back.

He found beauty in the minutiae of daily life everywhere he lived, especially in Japan. Unlike most Western visitors, Hearn approached Japanese culture and religion with an open mind, an intense curiosity and a respectful attitude. Hearn’s writings and his life in Japan offer important lessons for today’s world. Hearn’s eager embrace of a people so different from himself and of a culture totally foreign to him presents a welcome contrast to the rise in white supremacist ideology, anti-immigrant prejudice and ethnic and religious bigotry in the United States and Europe in recent years. Hearn’s humanistic outlook, cosmopolitan attitude and thirst for knowledge enabled him to investigate and understand Japan in a way few Westerners could at that time.

He was driven by a strong desire to document vanishing cultures and places. In Japan, he saw a country that wanted badly to compete in the modern, industrial world. Its leaders believed it must Westernize to survive as an independent nation. Hearn became embroiled in countless arguments with some of his Japanese teaching colleagues who advocated swift and sweeping changes to bring Japan in line with the outside world. He reluctantly came