Japan as the Successor to Ancient Greece? The Life of the Greco-Irish Folklorist Lafcadio Hearn
Lafcadio Hearn, known to the Japanese as Koizumi Yakumo, was a Greco-Irish journalist and scholar of international repute for his contributions to the study of Japanese society. Hearn’s 1890 arrival in Japan promptly led to his emergence as a significant scholar of Japanese religion, culture, and folklore, holding posts at Tokyo Imperial University and Waseda University. It was here that, in a Japanese society recently undergone the transformations of the Meiji Restoration, Hearn became an opponent of the Westernisation of Japanese society.
Of such significance to the preservation of Japanese cultural heritage following this period of great socio-political change, was Hearn’s work that in 1910, Yone Noguchi paid tribute to Hearn’s role in the Japanese scholarship writing:
‘We Japanese have been regenerated by his sudden magic, and baptized afresh under his transcendental rapture; in fact, the old romances which we had forgotten ages ago were brought again to quiver in the air, and the ancient beauty which we buried under the dust rose again with a strange yet new splendour. He made us shake the old robe of bias which we wore without knowing it, and gave us a sharp sensation of revival.’
Posthumously published yet considered his masterpiece Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation offers an articulation of this enigmatic society deeply rooted in its religious practices and beliefs. In it, Hearn’s affinity towards Japanese religion, both Buddhist and Shinto is indicated, with connection to his Spenserian and Darwinian intellectual influences.
For Hearn, Japanese society in the late nineteenth century was a mirror image of the classical world of Greco-Roman antiquity in both its public character, and it’s ability to capture the minds of onlookers.
‘The delicate perfection of workmanship, the light strength and grace of objects, the power manifest to obtain the best results with the least material, the achieving of mechanical ends by the simplest possible means, the comprehension of irregularity as aesthetic value, the shapeliness and perfect taste of everything, the sense displayed of harmony in tints and colours, - this must convince you at once that our Occident has much to learn from this remote civilization, not only in matters of art and taste, but in matters likewise of economy and utility. It is no barbarian fancy that appeals to you in those amazing porcelains, those astonishing embroideries, those wonders of lacquer an ivory and bronze, which educate imagination in unfamiliar ways. No: these are the products of a civilization which became, within its own limits, so exquisite that none but an artist is capable of judging its manufactures, - a civilization that can be termed imperfect only by those who would also term imperfect the Greek civilization of three thousand years ago.’
It was the articulation of Japanese society and its attributes into the Western mind that Hearn undertook as the capstone to his life’s work as a journalist and scholarship of the classical world and antiquarian folk customs internationally. And yet in his homeland Ireland, this figure of great accomplishment is relatively obscure, just as obscure as those other great folklorists whose efforts preserved our own cultural heritage.
In 1850, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkadia to a Greek Orthodox mother, and an Anglo-Irish medical officer in the British Army. At a young age, Hearn and his mother were sent to Ireland to live with his father’s family. With Hearn facing a personal religious crisis between the Orthodoxy of his mother, his father’s protestant family, and being taken in by his Catholic great-aunt, Hearn from a young age was troubled. Soon his mother and father divorced. His mother returned to Greece and remarried, cutting all contact with him and his younger brother, and was later sent to a mental asylum. Hearn’s father also remarried and took up post in India before his 1866 death of malaria in the Gulf of Suez.
It is from this troubled background that Hearn at a young age moved to the United States, eventually working as a journalist in Cincinnati. Spending years of his life in the profession of a journalist, Hearn eventually left to work as a correspondent in the French West Indies before his eventual 1890 arrival in Japan to continue this work.
Hearn’s enchantment with Japanese culture, therefore, ought to be understood within the framework of his personal experiences of cultural upheaval and change, coming from both mixed Greco-Irish ancestry, and through his experiences as an immigrant in the United States. Hearn, though a scholar of great aptitude, was driven far from his native land by personal struggles, and endeavoured to find solace as an emigrant. His initial visit to Japan, not undertaken with the foresight of the scholarly activities he would later undertake there, became a fortunate turn in Hearn’s life, releasing his literary skills to the upmost of their abilities in the articulation of the Far-East for the Western audience.
‘The mere sensation of the [Japanese] milieu is a placid happiness: it is like the sensation of a dream in which people greet us exactly as we like to be greeted, and say to us all that we would like to hear, and do for us all that we wish to have done, - people moving soundlessly through spaces of perfect repose, all bathed in vapoury light. Yes- for no little time these fairy-folk can give you all the soft bliss of sleep. But sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream, - never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness to a Japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, - into a world that is not, and never could be your own. You have been transported out of your own century – over spaces enormous of perished time – into an era forgotten, into a vanished age, - back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, - the secret of the thrill they give, - the secret of elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal! The tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is enchantment, - that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, - that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence.’
However, it is clear throughout Hearn’s writings that he was emphatically proud of both his Greek and Irish heritage. With his obsession with the glory of the classical world coming from his Greek heritage, and his unique fixation with folkloristic studies and literary endeavours being a product of his Irish heritage and experiences. When Hearn first left to the United States, he portrayed himself as Patrick the Irishman, rather than the Greco-Irish Lafcadio Hearn he is known as today. In Hearn’s correspondence with fellow Japanologist Osman Edwards in the later years of his career, he emphasized his Irish identity, writing: ‘…I am Irish rather than English; and I half hope to go, for a time at least, to Ireland.’ In his correspondence with Yeats, Hearn was noted for the statement ‘there is something ghostly in all good art’ and his discussion of the Irish literary revival. It is without doubt, that had Hearn remained in Ireland, he would have become a contributor to the Gaelic Revival.
‘Some of us, at least, have often wished that it were possible to live for a season in the beautiful vanished world of Greek culture. Inspired by our first acquaintance with the charm of Greek art and thought, this wish comes to us even before we are capable of imagining the true conditions of the antique civilization. If the wish could be realized, we should certainly find it impossible to accommodate ourselves to those conditions, - not so much because of the difficulty of learning the environment, as because of the much greater difficulty of feeling just as people used to feel some thirty centuries ago…’
Yet Hearn’s character, owing to his upbringing, was a lonely one in which he, through a deep nostalgia for the classical world, and desire to live in a world just as the folk-fairy tales of the world depicted, and found this in the exoticism and politeness of Meiji Japan. It is no surprise then, that Hearn argues: ‘Japan offers us the living spectacle of conditions older, and psychologically much farther away from us, than those of any Greek period…’.
Though Hearn worried that the impacts of the Meiji Restoration and subsequent opening up to the West would catapult Japanese society into the same internal crisis then brewing within the Western mind, he remained hopeful that ‘… the supreme interest of the old Japanese civilization lies in what it expresses of the race-character, - that character which yet remains essentially unchanged by all the changes of Meiji.’ Though unfortunately, Hearn’s concerns have inevitably come to pass.
Some of Hearn’s vast corpus of works relating to Japan include:
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan
Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan
Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
Japanese Fairy Tales
In Ghostly Japan
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation
Notably, in 1964 the stories of Hearn’s text Kwaidan were adapted into a fascinating Japanese horror film.
The rigid cultural bulwark of Japanese society is reminiscent of Irish-Ireland; a vision of revitalised Irish culture keeping at bay the influence of alien ideals.
Irish people lacking an erudite education in their own folklore studies and beliefs are therefore absent of the knowledge of the contributions and influence that Irish scholarship has inspired abroad. The Korean folklorist Inseop Jong, in the preface to his English language edition of Korean Folktales wrote ‘I came across some books about the Irish Renaissance movement, written by W. B. Yeats and others. It was then that I realized that the first step in a revival of literary consciousness in my native land must be a revival of interest in folk tales.’ This statement that the Gaelic revival and the work of Yeats in particular was a direct influence in his work to rebuild the nationalistic culture of the Korean nation further illustrates Ireland’s intellectual influence on cultural revival efforts in the modern world.
What the works of Hearn, and Irish folklorists throughout the world indicate is a lesson worth re-instantiating in Ireland’s contemporaneous intellectual revival: that by learning something from foreign cultures, you may learn something about your own.