This is a tale of how a remarkable Anglo-Irish-Greek international correspondent called Lafcadio Hearn, who was writing for Americans and Europe and who knew much about Japan, gained not only admiration, but also admiration from the Japanese themselves, who knew quite a lot. A century and a third back, he did it in Japan.
He is no longer also known in Europe or America, except among experts, but in Japan he remains an object of study, of enthusiasm and yet, for some, of adoration. How many international journalists have dedicated their lives to them in the nations they were writing in?
This is even more amazing than it may appear. The best foreign correspondents usually end up annoying or at least irritating their guests. After all, tumors and all, and some governments or elites would like to be brought up with the facts are their jobs.
Quite often, foreign journalists are the hardest writers for governments to control or drunk, except by kicking them out altogether, but when that is done their writing either disappears or becomes less well-informed. In recent years, international writers have been forced out of China, many of whom have relocated to Taipei or Singapore.
International reporters, if they stay a long time in the places they are sent to and really get to know their guests properly, tend to make the fear of their reporters back home who worry that they may “go native”. The worry is that their correspondent might become unquestioning and stop to place new stories. This worry has been disproven by a number of exceptional, seasoned journalists, many of whom have been reliable.
However, perhaps the most famous event of a journalist who did get native is Walter Duranty, a Briton who was the , New York Times’s man in Moscow under Stalin, who won Pulitzer prizes for his coverage, and still notably dismissed reports of famine in Ukraine as nonsense. In the 2019 video,  ,” Mr Jones”, about the Welsh blogger Gareth Jones who did discover the , Holomodor, Duranty is depicted as a debauchee, also as a dual agent.
Additionally, in stable times, which in the news industry means dull ones, another danger appears: foreign correspondents frequently find themselves looking for strange and unusual stories because those are the types of stories that are most likely to interest their bosses in the country and entertain the viewer or reader.
Few host countries, however, like to be turned into freak shows in which the exotic becomes central to their apparent identity. And the more remote and less well-known the country, the more likely it will be for foreign writers to resort to the freak-show treatment.
This is not meant to denigrate the foreign correspondent, which this author would never do – having served as one in both Brussels and Tokyo and having, as editor-in-chief of , The Economist,  , benefited from the work of many fine practitioners of that craft.
Rather, the temptation to focus on the odd is – to state an awkward reality – one that is particularly true for Japan and one that only well-informed and careful news editors back home can steer their correspondents away from. Japan is a country full of exotic tales, at least from the perspective of the Europeans and Americans, partly due to its abundance of them. But it is also because the quite conformist, do n’t-rock-the-boat culture of Japan tends to mitigate against a lively news agenda, boosting the incentive to seek out the colorful.
The exoticizer who adopted a native
The Japan to which Lafcadio Hearn arrived by ship in 1890 from the United States, where he had been working as a journalist and author in Cincinnati and New Orleans, was of course a place very different from the country we know today. After two centuries of self-imposed isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan had in 1853 reluctantly opened up to European and American trade, technology and diplomacy and then suffered two turbulent, violent decades of civil war and disorder.
The nation that welcomed Hearn also embarked on an urgent, determined strategy of modernization and westernization in order to heal domestic divisions and ward off foreign threats, as well as the establishment of a new constitution in 1889 and the coupd’etat that led to the resumption of the Japanese emperor in 1868.
But to Westerners it was also wonderfully exotic, with an influx of Japan’s art and design to Europe bringing about the late 19th , century fad of , Japonisme. You need only to watch Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera,  ,” The Mikado” to understand how Japanese images could still be distorted and interpreted in native American culture.
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece in 1850 as the son of a Greek mother and Anglo-Irish father, whose marriage was later annulled – and then both parents in effect deserted him, leaving Lafcadio to be raised by relatives in Ireland and schooled in England.
All that made him, arguably, a classic product of the British empire, albeit at the poor end of the range: somewhat stateless, with a mixed, perhaps confused, identity, but also able to make his way in the great country of stateless migrants of the era, the United States.
He did so by landing interviews as a journalist, working as a translator of French literature, and then contributing to publications on topics as diverse as Louisiana voodoo, West Indian slavery, and Creole cuisine.
Running out of employers and enthusiasm, especially in the aftermath of controversy surrounding his illegal marriage in Ohio to a black woman, Hearn then accepted a commission from , Harper ‘s , magazine to travel to and write about Japan.
The fundamental tenets of Hearn’s journalism, both in America and Japan, would be well known to the numerous Tokyo correspondents working today to get their stories published. Here is what he wrote about his approach, in a letter to a friend:
I think a man must devote himself to one thing in order to succeed: so I have pledged me to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous. It quite suits my personality.
To be fair, when in Japan Hearn did not only follow that aspect of his temperament. In a strict, modern sense, he also wasn’t what we now consider to be a foreign correspondent because he fell out with his editors at Harper’s, which soon made him work teaching English, managed to make money from his writing primarily through getting books published rather than magazines or newspapers.
But in an era when such news reports as existed were sent by seaborne mail and when readers had little knowledge of the countries being written about, books frequently satisfied the need for information, understanding and entertainment that media of all kinds satisfy today.
In his most well-known books, alongside the Odd and the Exotic he also sought to describe ordinary life in Japan. By the 1890s, many books about Japan had already been written by Britons, Americans, and other foreigners who had come before him, whether as diplomats, teachers, engineers, or government advisers, but the majority of them were in fact traveller’s tales rather than thorough analyses.
Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan ( 1894 ) and Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation ( 1904 ) aimed both to paint a picture of Japanese society and to dig beneath the surface.
Alongside those general works, however, Hearn also conveyed his versions of Japanese ghost stories, fairy tales and religion, mostly collected for him by the Japanese woman, Setsuko Koizumi, whom he married in 1891, a marriage which later led him to take a Japanese name, Yakumo Koizumi.
In his books Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things ( 2004 ), In Ghostly Japan ( 1999 ), and Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life ( 1996 ), the author’s portrayal of a nation steeped in the supernatural, one that feigned the animist ideologies of its Shinto religion and Buddhism’s more psychological spiritualism, and where the real and the imagined seemed to sometimes be difficult to distinguish between.
Contemporary western readers of Hearn, like audiences of Gilbert &, Sullivan, will have thought of Japan as a mysterious place: partly wonderful, partly weird, partly entertaining. Hearn also shared with them that the Japanese were a people one could admire and be interested in but who they could never truly comprehend.
From Marco Polo to Sofia Coppola
He lived in Japan for the last 14 years of his short life ( he died in 1904 at 54 years old ), took a Japanese name and built a Japanese family of four children with Setsuko, but never mastered the Japanese language. Despite his best efforts, he consistently believed that Japan was fundamentally different from Europe and America.
Hearn was far from the first to view Japan as both different and exotic. In fact, Marco Polo, an Italian correspondent, reported the existence of a nation he had never visited but had been informed about during his trip to Beijing, known as” Zipangu,” or the land of gold. ” The King’s Palace”, said , Travels of Marco Polo, “is roofed with pure gold and his floors are paved in gold two fingers thick”.
Perhaps we should blame Polo’s ghostwriter, Rustichello da Pisa, for bigging up the rumor his employer had brought home with him.
In the middle of the 1990s, a group of Japanese became enraged by what they perceived as stereotyped, false reporting in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, in the city of Tokyo. Polo’s” Zipangu” also came in handy as a term of abuse. The group, who were themselves based in New York, used a blog and then a book, Japan Made in the USA, to attack Kristoff as a new peddler of what they saw as Zipangu myths.
Although it was a time when Japan’s economy and thus self-assurance had taken a significant dip, it must be said. A previously all-conquering stock market had crashed, banks wobbled and then new pain emerged in 1995 from a home-grown terrorist group,  , Aum Shinrikyo, which used Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground to kill 13 people, and from a devastating earthquake that same year in Kobe in western Japan. Nerves were raw and perceived criticisms evidently unwelcome.
However, early in the new millennium, a less edificed time, provided additional proof that a perception of Japan as an exotic, even odd, place might not be welcomed. I will illustrate this with an anecdote connecting Peter, now Lord, Mandelson and the filmmaker Sofia Coppola.
I found myself attending a meeting of British and Japanese officials, scholars, and businesspeople taking place in Britain and presided over by Peter Mandelson shortly after Coppola’s film,  ,” Lost in Translation” about characters played by Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanssen finding themselves adrift and befuddled in their lives and in Tokyo. When we gathered for the opening session, Mandelson tried to break the ice by mentioning” Lost in Translation”.
” Wasn’t it wonderful”, I recall him saying. Some Brits bowed and offered their thanks.
The Japanese looked stony-faced.
Now, for some of the Japanese attendees, the blank reaction could have been embarrassment or just jet lag. But I realized later that there was another reason: Coppola’s film had gone down like a lead balloon in Japan.
Although her main topic was the not-quite love affair between the characters played by Murray and Johanssen, that story was set against a backdrop of Japanese exotica, or perhaps plain weirdness, ranging from a kooky whisky advert that Murray’s character was filming to funny mispronunciations to a bizarre night-club. Japanese critics and audiences for the most part did not like this. Some even , found it racist.
Why Hearn’s racism and stereotyping were acceptable?
On the face of it, Hearn’s depictions of Japan in the late 19th , century might also have gone down like a lead balloon. Indeed, they may have done so at first with Japanese diplomats who were trying to persuade westerners and the Japanese public alike that their country did not deserve to suffer under “unequal treaties”.
After all, this nation was trying to modernize itself and become strong and united enough to fight wars with China and Russia in the years of 1895 and 1904. Hearn did express some patriotic support for such Japanese nationalism, but at the same time his books idealized the Japan that was being left behind by a modernization of which he disapproved.
In addition, his analysis of Japan highlighted what he thought were inherent racial differences from Westerners rather than differences in circumstances or stages of development. He and the British mentor who had helped him find his first teaching job, a language scholar called Basil Hall Chamberlain, fell out in part over whether it was nature or nurture that explained Japan’s cultural particularities.
Lafcadio Hearn was stubbornly racist but also romantic. He did not use his racial stereotyping to criticize or denigrate Japan, but rather to praise it. We can speculate that he may have preferred racial explanations of cultural difference because he thought them likelier to be resilient against modernization.
He displayed what might be regarded as a crucial trait of a foreign correspondent working as a double agent: a genuine sympathy for the subjects he was writing about.
His timing was also fortuitous. The era was one during which Japan was experiencing momentous and rapid change, but in which the Japanese government was also seeking to use tradition as a stabilizing force. In much the same way that The Invention of Tradition ( 1914 ), British historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger portrayed the Japanese leaders of the late 19th century returning to imperial rule and the Shinto religion to bolster – some might say, establish a Japanese national identity.
A foreign writer such as Hearn, one with a strong sympathy for what he saw as traditional Japan, was therefore a useful validator. He not only contributed to the dissemination of a positive outlook on his adopted nation to readers in Europe and America, but he also contributed to the transmission of the message Japan itself was trying to send.
This may explain why, without apparent qualifications, Hearn landed a job teaching English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, which is still today ( shorn since 1945 of the word “imperial” ) the country’s leading educational institution. It might have seemed a good idea to support Hearn’s stay in Japan and place where he had previously held prominent provincial teaching positions.
But even if there was no conspiracy to exploit Hearn, he was nonetheless extremely useful at a moment when Japan was going through something of an identity crisis. Half a century later, something similar happened once more.
During World War Two the US Office of War Information commissioned an American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, to do a study of Japanese society and culture, initially as a “know your enemy” project but which then in 1946 was published in book form as , The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Benedict’s book remains on the reading lists of many foreigners moving to live in Japan.
More impressive is the fact that this book, written by an American author who had never traveled to Japan, had sold more than 2.3 million copies in Japanese translation by the end of the 1990s, more than six times as many as it had in English.
Defeat had brought a period of questioning of Japan’s identity similar to that in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Benedict’s study also provided a kind of validation as well as providing an outsider’s perspective to an uncertain population, like Hearn’s books did. Nonetheless, what is also surprising about that sense of validation is that Benedict’s book, somewhat like some of Hearn’s, can be considered guilty of summing up a large and complex nation with a series of sweeping generalizations – the most famous of which is of Japan being a” shame culture” while the West is a “guilt culture”.
Plenty of academics have criticized Benedict’s generalizations, just as Basil Hall Chamberlain criticized Hearn’s. Benedict and Hearn have still been embraced, most notably by the nationalist movement known as Nihonjinron, a study of Japaneseness that began in 19th , Japan but advanced especially after 1945. Generalize as much as you like, the , Nihonjinron , devotees seem to say – as long as you show how different, and special, the Japanese are compared with westerners.
The Anglo-Irish-Greek foreign correspondent Patrick Lafcadio Hearn became a successful late 19th century double agent because he showed sympathy for Japanese society rather than lectured or criticized, because he helped shore up Japan’s sense of identity during a time of turmoil, and because his work supported the idea of Nihonjinron.
The fact that he left a Japanese family behind him also helped greatly, for his descendants remain vital preservers of his legacy, notably the museum dedicated to him in Matsue, the provincial town in which he made his first family home.
In recent years, his memory and legacy have also been celebrated and marked by exhibitions and events in Ireland, Greece, Cincinnati and New Orleans. His writing is undoubtedly vivid, which has undoubtedly helped. In the end, whether you agree or disagree with him, he marked out the subjects of his writing as being exceptional and different, which is what he was, too.
Bill Emmott, who was previously The Economist’s editor-in-chief, is currently chairman of the , Japan Society of the UK, the , International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the , International Trade Institute. This essay, originally published by Engelsberg Ideas, is based on a lecture he gave in Dublin on April 12 as part of a series linked to an exhibition of new prints based on the Kwaidan ghost stories. Asia Times is republishing with kind permission.