Lafcadio Hearn was the son of a Greek mother and an Irish father. His father, Charles Hearn, was a British army officer serving in Greece. “Lafcadio” was the name he adopted when he arrived in the U.S. He was leaving behind his “real” name “Patrick”. It is a measure of his success that one can scarcely imagine him being called “Pat Hearn” much less “Paddy Hearn”.
Hearn was born on the island of Lefkada (the source of “Lafcadio”). After a couple of years in Dublin, his mother had what is now called a “nervous breakdown” and was sent back to Greece, never to be seen again. Patrick was consigned to his Catholic aunt, and was sent to a Catholic boarding school in the North of England.
He migrated to the U.S. at the age of nineteen, became a successful journalist--specialising in the sub-Poe grotesque, travelled to Japan on an assignment when he was forty, and never left. He got a job teaching at a school in Matsue, on the Sea of Japan coast.
Hearn loved it there but, after staying for less than a year, accepted a job at The Fifth High School (fifth on a national grid) in Kumamoto, hoping that the winter would be less severe. He was three years in Kumamoto, working as a “Foreign Teacher”.
After Matsue, he found Kumamoto disappointingly modern and Western. Hearn took Japanese nationality, adopted the name Koizumi Yakumo (Koizumi being the family name of his wife), and died in Tokyo, after increasingly unhappy years teaching, first at the Imperial University (now Tokyo University), and then at the private Waseda University.
Hearn is perhaps the most famous foreigner to have played a role in Japan’s domestic history and looms large both in Kumamoto and in Matsue.
As two of his many successors in the rank of “Foreign Teacher”, both sharing his dislike of Western imperial arrogance, and of the apostolic zeal of many Christian churches, my friend Alan and I have felt ourselves living in the long shadow of the little Irishman; Alan much more than I, as he has been a long-serving “Foreign Teacher” at the same university where Hearn taught, over a century ago.
Although too remote an ancestor to cause anxiety, Hearn’s prolific writings, and his extraordinary ability to elicit fascinating information with limited Japanese, make it difficult for any “Foreign Teacher” to avoid feeling that one’s own achievements pale in comparison.
Hearn published an average of a book a year all the years he was in Japan. Seeing them together in all their collective bulk at the Hearn museum at Matsue left me in awe of his diligence.
For all of his anti-imperialism, Hearn was quite happy to identify as a Englishman in the best “West-British” style. When his son Kazuo was born, he wrote to a friend in the U.S. that he took after his father, with his “English looks”. I discovered this when I was asked to do the role of Hearn in a play about his life in Kumamoto.
It was written by a local playwright, Ogata Jun. The Japanese script has Hearn writing with pride about his son’s “Irish looks”. I checked with Alan, who is one of the leading Hearn scholars, and learned that the “English” in the original letter had been changed to “Irish”.
Although a precocious admirer of Yeats, whose poems he introduced to students in Kumamoto within years of their publication, Hearn seems to have been profoundly ambiguous about his Irish identity, and the paucity of references to his homeland contrasts with the volumes he wrote about his beloved Japan.
It’s ironic then that the performance of the play was immersed in the music of the Chieftains, and that the Irish Ambassador flew down for every major Hearn function in Kumamoto or Matsue. One puzzled Irish ambassador was reported in the Kumamoto as wondering why Hearn was so popular with Japanese people. Prof. Nakajima, the chair of the local Hearn research group, replied, “We like him because he liked us” [Kumamoto Nichi Nichi Shinbun circa 1994].
Hearn was too complex a man to ever remain the simple fan of the “faery land” of his first day in Yokohama. [See the Penguin anthology of Hearn’s writings.] In his letters to other Western correspondents, he reveals a jaundiced perspective on the academics and bureaucrats who had so much power over him. He jokingly writes that the main task of a “Foreign Teacher” is “to keep the clams happy”. Today’s students are hardly more vocal than the ‘clams’ of a century ago, but they do not share the thirst for knowledge of their “senpai”, (“seniors”/predecessors) of the Meiji period.
Hearn appears to have been an inspirational teacher, and the prospect of following him at Kumamoto and then at Tokyo was a cause of great anxiety for the young writer Natsume Soseki, who felt that he was being selected, not on his merits, but merely because he was Japanese. (Soseki was one of the first generation of Japanese students who had been educated at the new Imperial University and his appointment in Hearn’s place was part of the assertion of academic independence that accompanied Japan’s growing assertiveness on the imperial stage.)
For all that Hearn’s choice of Japanese nationality has been a source of pride to succeeding generations of Japanese people, it was not without its ironic cost. At that time, “Foreign Teachers” earned salaries many times that of their Japanese colleagues. Hearn noted with some satisfaction that he earned more than the Governor of the Prefecture. At the Imperial University, his change of nationality was used as an excuse to reduce his salary by eighty per cent. For all his sympathy for Japanese determination to maintain national independence, Hearn saw this as impossible to accept with dignity, and left for the private Waseda University, where he died shortly afterwards.
Dignity was not the only issue. He was supporting a large household, his wife and children, his wife’s parents and even her adopted parents, not to mention several retainers.
He remained an outsider, unable to hold his own socially in Japanese-speaking environments, till the day he died.
[I am grateful to Dr. Alan Rosen of Kumamoto University for introducing me to Hearn and for generously pointing out some of the mistakes.]
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