LEFCADIO HEARN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4559, 13 April 1942, Page 7

LEFCADIO HEARN

REMARKABLE career CELT WHO TURNED JAPANESE For the insight they give into Japanese psychology and Japanese ambitions the books of Lafcadio Hearn are worth re-reading to-day. This strange, wayward Irishman, with Greek and gipsy blood in his veins, was one of the first to interpret the “New Japan” to the Western world. The interest Of his subject, as well as the clear beauty of his prose, made his books enormously popular in their day. Hearn’s unequivocal surrender to the spell of Nippon—a surrender so complete that he took a Japanese wife, Japanese nationality and Japanese name—rendered him incapable of seeing anything but good in Japanese institutions, religions, codes and manners, and much of his writing has a grotesquely false ring to-day. But though history has given the lie to so many of his contentions and prophecies, there is much in his books that makes illuminating—and indeed salutary—reading now. Hearn went to Japan as a newspaper correspondent in 1890. A year before the Japanese consitution had been promulgated, the first Diet had met in Tokio, and Japan was working feverishly to build up her artny, to create a navy, to push forward industry and trade. The Western world realised that this vigorous new regime that was catapulting Japan »to power in the Far East was “news,” and Hearn was one of the first newspaper men to be sent to cover it on the spot. He did not last long in that role, but he never returned from Japan. He fell completely under the sway of Japanese ideas, and, slamming the door of Western civilisation behind him for ever, lived out the rest of his life as one of the Son of Heaven’s millions of subjects. STRANGE WARPED LIFE Hearn boasted a set of names as strange as his personality and his queer, warped life. Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos he was christened —the Lafcardio acquired, presumably, from the place of his birth. Leucadia, one of the Greek lonian Islands. Tessima was .his mother’s maiden name; she was a Greek whom his armydoctor father, Charles Hearn of King’s County, met and married in Corfu, where he had been sent with a contingent of British troops in 1846. A year after Lafcadio was born the British garrison was withdrawn from the lonian Islands, and when Charles Hearn was transferred to the West Indies he sent his wife and son to live with his relatives in Dublin. It was not a success. Rosa, his wife, coupled a violent temper with her exotic beauty; she was uneducated, incurably lazy—and bitterly unhappy. When her husband returned to Ireland two years later he found her grossly fat, blowsy and sullen, and his son a sickly, gnome-like little creature dressed un in gipsy clothes and dangling earrings. The marriage was dissolved, and when Charles Hearn went off to India he left the boy behind under the charge of a great-aunt, who insisted that she should be allowed to bring him up in the Catholic faith. YEARS IN AMERICA At 19 Hearn was thrown upon his own resources and what little money he had he decided to risk on crossing to America to seek his fortune there. His funds ran out long before he had found a job. “I had to sleep for nights in the streets—for which the police scolded me,” he recalled in a letter to a friend ..years afterwards. “Then I found refuge in a mews where some English coachmen allowed me to sleep in a hay loft at night and fed me by stealth with vituals stolen from the house. At last I became a boarding house servant, lighted fires and shovelled coal in exchange for food and the privilege of sleeping on the floor of the smoking room. I worked thus for about one year and a half, finding time to read and write stories. The stories were published in cheap weekly papers, but I was never paid for them. I tried other occupations also—canvassing, show card writing, etc. These brought me enough to buy smoking tobacco and secondhand clothes —nothing more.” Soon after he had arrived in Cincinnati Hearn had struck up a friendship with an eccentric old printer from England called Watkin. The old man gave him food and a bed in a corner of his shop, and in return Hearn ran errands for him. The friendship between the two lasted all Hearn’s life; to Watkin, he was always “The Raven,” because, so the old man told a friend, his gloomy views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and the uncanny reminded him of Poe at his best—or his worst. NEWSPAPER DAYS From Cincinnati, Hearn went to New Orleans with 70 dollars in his pocket. There he had long periods of joblessness before, in 1881, he managed to get on the staff of the leading newspaper, the “Times Democrat.” For the first time he tasted reasonable security and reasonable comfort, and the nearest approach to happiness he had ever known. But he could never be really content, and in his

writings of this period he is continually railing against civilisation. “I want to get back amongst the monkeys and the parrots, under a violet sky, among green peaks, and an eternally lilac and lukewarm sea, where clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an exertion,” he declared. “Civilisation is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery! Surely a palm 200 feet high is a finer thing in the natural order than 70 times seven New Yorks!” In 1887 his paper sent him to the West Indies as its correspondent, and then in 1890 he got his assignment to Japan. For a while he contributed regular articles on Japan’s new regime to the “Atlantic Monthly”—articles published later in book, form as “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.” But soon after his arrival Professor Basil Chamberlain, professor of English at the Tokio University, had got him a job as English teacher in a school in Matsue, in the province of Izumo, and Hearn drifted out of journalism to make teaching his career. He had been charmed from the first by “the .gentleness and docility” of Japanese women, and it was not long before he married a Samurai maiden, Setsu Koizumi. When his first child was born in 1893 he became a naturalised Japanese, taking the name of Yakumo Koizumi. Three years later he was appointed professor of English at the Imperial University in Tokio. While he was there he wrote nine of his books an Japan. Then in 1903 he was forced out of the university on the pretext that, as a Japanese citizen, he was not entitled to a foreign salary. A year later he died, and was given a Buddhist funeral, though whether or not he actually embraced Buddhism is a point on which his biographers cannot agree. NO FEAR OF DEATH It is for their interpretation of the Japanese mind, character and racial aims that Hearn’s books are interesting to-day. When he arrived in Japan he was immediately struck by the skill with which the new regime had turned the achievements of the Western world to its own advantage, copying, adopting or discarding, as Japan’s own particular needs dictated. He found a parallel for this assimilative process in jiujitsu, the old Samurai art of fighting without weapons. Literally, jiujitsu means “to conquer by yielding,” and the principle of this strange art, which teaches never to oppose force to force, but to utilise the power of the attack to overthrow the enemy by his own strength, Hearn saw applied in the national life of the country. Japan, he found, had adopted a military system founded upon the best experience of France and Germany, modelled her navy on English and French teaching, made her. dock yards under French patterned her public school education upon that of Germany, France and America, imported machinery and experts for her factories, mills and mines—till she was ready to replace them with her own products. “In all this she has adopted nothing for a merely imitative reason,” he wrote. “On the contrary, she has approved and taken only what can help her to increase her strength. She has not adopted Western dress, Western habits of life, Western achitecture or Western religion, since the introduction of any of these would have diminished her force. Despite her railroads and steamship lines, her telegraphs' and telephones, her postal service and her express companies, her steel artillery and magazine rilles, her universities and technical schools, she remains just as Oriental to-day as she was 1000 years ago. She has been able to remain herself and to profit to the utmost possible limit by the strength of the enemy. She has been and still is, defending herself by the most admirable system of self-defence ever heard of—by. a marvellous national jiujitsu. “Should Japan fall, her misfortunes will certainly not be owing to any lack of national spirit,” ■ Hearn continues. “That quality she possesses in a degree without existing modern parallel —in a degree that so trite a word as patriotism is utterly powerless to represent.” The observations that he has to make on this “national spirit” hold a particular interest for the present day. Hearn was teaching in Kumamoto in 1894, when Japan declared war on China, and he writes:— “The enthusiasm of the nation was concentrated and silent; but under that exterior calm smouldered all the fierceness of the old feudal days. The Government was obliged to decline the freely profered services of myriads of volunteers. Many killed themselves on being refused the chance of military service. The gendarme at Soul, ordered to escort Minister Otori back to Japan, killed himself for chagrin at not having been allowed to proceed instead to the field of battle. An officer named Ishiyama, prevented by illness from joining his regiment on the day of its departure for Korea, rose from his sick bed, and after saluting a portrait of the Emperor, killed himself with his sword. In the story of a Tokio lieutenant who, having no one to care for his little motherless girl, killed her so that he. would be free to join his regiment. Hearn found a grim reminder of the spirit of feudal times, when the Samurai sometimes killed his wife and children, “the better to forget those things no warrior should remember on

the battlefield—home, the dear ones and his own body.” “Japan may well be grateful to her two great religions—to Shinto, which taught the individual to think of his Emperor and his country before thinking either of his own family or of himself, and to Buddhism, which trained him to master regret, to endure pain and to accept as eternal law the vanishing of- things loved and the tyranny of things hated,” Hearn declared. In the simplicity of their physical needs Hearn found another powerful weapon in the Japanese drive for power. “Ability to live without furniture, without impedimenta, with the least possible amount of clothing, shows more than the advantage held by this Japanese race in the struggle for life,” he wrote. “It shows also the real character of some weaknesses in our own civilisation. We must have meat and bread and butter, hats, shirts and woollen underwear, bedsteads, sheets and blankets—all of which a Japanese can do without. Nature has given him perfect feet that can spring him over 50 miles a day without pain, a stomach whose chemistry can extract nourishment from food on which no European could live, and a constitution that scorns heat, cold and damp alike.”

But at the same time Hearn was forced to admit that many of his own students suffered mental or physical breakdowns under the strain of working long hours thinly clad in an unheated classroom on a diet of boiled rice and bean curd. Many more killed themselves if they failed in their examinations or fell into disgrace. His conclusion is that while “none love life more than the Japanese, none fear death less.”