An Irish author in Japan

As part of my recent readings of Japanese short stories, I started reading some fun ghost stories written by a man in the late 19th century by the name of Koizumi Yakumo (小泉八雲), but when I read the biography in the back of the book, I was quite surprised to see that Koizumi Yakumo was actually an Irishman named Lafcadio Hearn. Lafcadio was actually born in Greece, but by age 2 grew up the famous neighborhood of Rathmines, south of the Grand Canal in Dublin.*

Ireland has no shortage of excellent authors, including Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Yeats, Bram Stoker and so on, but Hearn was a fellow I had never heard of. What really touched me about his story was that like many Irish people, he did quite a bit of traveling in his life. I asked a Irish cab driver one time, who ironically looked quite a bit like the picture above, by the way, why so many people traveled so much, and he argued that Ireland had known war and famine for so long, people were ingrained with the habit of getting away to other parts of the world and making their fortune there. True enough though, nearly everyone I have met has lived somewhere outside of Ireland for a time, be it the UK, Europe, the US or elsewhere. In the US, living outside the US was something unusual. The fact that so many in the US don’t have passports shows how little we travel and how little we understand the rest of the world. ‘Tis a shame we don’t travel more, as living in Vietnam in 2001 taught me some pretty harsh realities in the world (and taught me gratitude), and being in Ireland now has changed some old habits for the better.

Anyways, Hearn later came to Japan and fell in love the culture and stayed there, eventually marrying a Japanese woman and adopting her family’s name. Keep in mind that Japan had just come out of 200+ years of isolation during the Tokugawa Period in what’s called the Meiji Restoration. As I recall from course in college, the Meiji Restoration was a time when Japan was hungrily absorbing Western technology and learning in an effort to catch up,** and to avoid the same fate other East Asian countries had suffered with conquest and colonization. So Japan at the time was still a fresh mix of the medieval and the modern. Hearn made good use of this culture in his writings, which are still celebrated today.

What I admire about Hearn was the fact that despite being an older fellow, with no exposure to Japanese culture before coming there, he obviously mastered the language enough to collect and author ghost stories. Also, his love of Japan is something I share. I say all this since I am in my early 30′s and only now really making an effort to learn the language professionally. At times, I’ve worried because my little girl whose 2 years old is grasping the language so much faster and smoothly than I am, so I worried about being too old for this. However, I find Hearn’s example very inspirational, and if you’re learning Japanese, I hope you do too.

It’s also a salute to Ireland’s fine tradition of wanderers and authors! Being infected with the excitement surrounding St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I have to say: Go Ireland!

Namu Amida Butsu

* – I work much further to the westside of Dublin, so I rarely ever have a need to be in Rathmines or Grand Canal.

** – Case in point: the roads are designed along British lines (people drive on the left side), the territories are divided into prefectures like France, while the original Meiji constitution (Pre-1945) was based on the Prussian model. All this was mixed with American technology at the time.