Lafcadio Hearn's Japan (3 page)

The professor, already a famous man, living in Japan since 1873, was a distinguished scholar in the country; had mastered Japanese and was an authority on the language; had translated the oldest Japanese document, the
Kojiki;
had written on Japanese classical poetry; and had edited the still popular book about Japanese customs called
Things Japanese.
Consequently, he was also in a position to find friends jobs.

For Hearn, living in Matsue was a defining experience. In earlier places—Martinique, New Orleans, Cincinnati—he had learned to cultivate the occasionally exotic, but in this isolated city on the Japan Sea the exotic became for him a daily experience. So exotic that he, not knowing the language, understanding little of the culture, was at some disadvantage in his everyday life—shopping and cooking, for example.

The solution was a common one, reached by many men in similar circumstances: he must get married. Indeed, Hearn's beloved mentor, Sir Edwin Arnold, was to marry a Japanese. Accordingly Lafcadio submitted to an arranged marriage—with Setsuko Koizumi, the young daughter of a local déclassé samurai household.

This marriage was a success (his first, to a Cincinnati mulatto had not been) and it was to Setsuko that Hearn owed much of the felicity of his later years. Without her, Lafcadio could not have gathered all the information he needed, and certainly without her he could not have had the four children who so delighted his declining years.

He also could not have gotten the house that they moved into in June 1891. It still stands. This is the small dwelling opening up onto its small garden which is shown visitors to Matsue—Hearn's glasses still on an open page, his pipe still in its tray. His delight both in the house and in the marriage is seen in one of his best essays from this period, “In a Japanese Garden.”

During this enchanted Matsue year Hearn and his wife made a number of excursions to nearby places, and from these outings came some of his most memorable early writings. He traveled up and down the coast, went to Izumo, “home of the gods,” even went (as a kind of belated honeymoon trip) to the distant Oki islands.

Here included are two of the finest of these early descriptions of Japan—one that has been forgotten and one that is rightfully famous. The first is an account of an excursion Hearn made to a nearby community of outcasts—that group now known as
burakumin
and then locally known as
yama no mono.
The second is a description of a boat trip to the Kuikedo—a place he calls “The Cave of the Children's Ghosts.”

Eventually, however, paradise was lost. In the fall of 1891, his contract with the Matsue schools ran out and again through the always helpful Chamberlain, he and Setsu moved to Kumamoto, where he was to teach at the local higher middle school. From the first he disliked the place—though after Matsue he would probably have disliked any place at all.

Kumamoto, on the farther side of the southernmost island, Kyushu, had been much damaged in the civil wars attending the Meiji Restoration. The castle had been burned down, whole sections of the old city destroyed, and the new buildings were all Western and badly built at that. He might have been in St. Louis. Old Japan was that far away.

Nonetheless, Kumamoto gave Hearn the time he needed to complete his first book on the country,
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.
In it he kept his promise to his publisher “to give a vivid impression of living in Japan.” It is still his most popular collection.

Whether it also gives the impression of “one taking part in the daily existence of the common people, and thinking with their thoughts” (the rest of the promise) is a matter of opinion. Mine is that the worth of this book—the worth of all his Japan writings—lies in Hearn's ability to show us the common (as differentiated from the quaint, the fanciful, the picturesque) face of Japan; to retain for us the feel of the ordinary scene with ordinary people in it.

This he does in a late piece, the 1904 “Letter from Japan,” written in Tokyo and devoted to the daily life of the people and what they were thinking about. These thoughts were largely political, a concern that Hearn had hitherto avoided.

When he had arrived in 1890, Japan's first constitutional government was sitting, however unhappily, in Tokyo but he, in old Matsue, could ignore it. By 1894, however, political reality was intruding itself. Japan had gone to war with China and many—among them some of his former students—died in the resulting battles. Now, in 1904, the Japanese were defeating the Russians, and these victories would ensure that the country became even more modern even faster.

This new feeling he reflects in his 1904 letter—a description of the country in all ways different from that in “My First Day in the Orient,” of nearly fifteen years before. The fairy-tale atmosphere has evaporated and enchantment has metamorphosed itself into reality.

Just before this, however, Hearn had—Prospero closing his book—utilized the trappings of enchantment for one final time to fashion an extraordinarily prescient piece called “H
ō
rai,” which, though it pretends to be a description of an old painting of the ancient Taoist isle, is actually an allegory of the modern archipelago of Japan.

“Evil winds from the West are blowing over H
ō
rai; and the
magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them . . .
never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams. . . .”

Hearn, the one-eyed, saw well what was happening to his Japan.

Strangeness and Charm

The majority of the first impressions of Japan recorded by travelers are pleasurable impressions. Indeed, there must be something lacking, or something very harsh, in the nature to which Japan can make no emotional appeal. The appeal itself is the clue to a problem; and that problem is the character of a race and of its civilization.

My own first impressions of Japan,—Japan as seen in the white sunshine of a perfect spring day,—had doubtless much in common with the average of such experiences. I remember especially the wonder and the delight of the vision. The wonder and the delight have never passed away: they are often revived for me even now, by some chance happening, after fourteen years of sojourn. But the reason of these feelings was difficult to learn,—or at least to guess; for I cannot yet claim to know much about Japan. . . . Long ago the best and dearest Japanese friend I ever had said to me, a little before his death: “When you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you will begin to know something about them.” After having realized the truth of my friend's prediction,—after having discovered that I cannot understand the Japanese at all,—I feel better qualified to attempt this essay.

As first perceived, the outward strangeness of things in Japan produces (in certain minds, at least) a queer thrill impossible to describe,—a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar. You find yourself moving through queer small streets full of odd small people, wearing robes and sandals of extraordinary shapes; and you can scarcely distinguish the sexes at sight. The houses are constructed and furnished in ways alien to all your experience; and you are astonished to find that you cannot conceive the use or meaning of numberless things on display in the shops. Food-stuffs of unimaginable derivation; utensils of enigmatic forms; emblems incomprehensible of some mysterious belief; strange masks and toys that commemorate legends of gods or demons; odd figures, too, of the gods themselves, with monstrous ears and smiling faces,—all these you may perceive as you wander about; though you must also notice telegraph-poles and type-writers, electric lamps and sewing machines. Everywhere on signs and hangings, and on the backs of people passing by, you will observe wonderful Chinese characters; and the wizardry of all these texts makes the dominant tone of the spectacle.

Further acquaintance with this fantastic world will in nowise diminish the sense of strangeness evoked by the first vision of it. You will soon observe that even the physical actions of the people are unfamiliar,—that their work is done in ways the opposite of Western ways. Tools are of surprising shapes, and are handled after surprising methods: the blacksmith squats at his anvil, wielding a hammer such as no Western smith could use without long practice; the carpenter pulls, instead of pushing, his extraordinary plane and saw. Always the left is the right side, and the right side the wrong; and keys must be turned, to open or close a lock, in what we are accustomed to think the wrong direction. Mr. Percival Lowell has truthfully observed that the Japanese speak backwards, read backwards, write backwards,— and that this is “only the abc of their contrariety.” For the habit of writing backwards there are obvious evolutional reasons; and the requirements of Japanese calligraphy sufficiently explain why the artist pushes his brush or pencil instead of pulling it. But why, instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle, should the Japanese maiden slip the eye of the needle over the point of the thread? Perhaps the most remarkable, out of a hundred possible examples of antipodal action, is furnished by the Japanese art of fencing. The swordsman, delivering his blow with both hands, does not pull the blade towards him in the moment of striking, but pushes it from him. He uses it, indeed, as other Asiatics do, not on the principle of the wedge, but of the saw; yet there is a pushing motion where we should expect a pulling motion in the stroke. . . . These and other forms of unfamiliar action are strange enough to suggest the notion of a humanity even physically as little related to us as might be the population of another planet,—the notion of some anatomical unlikeness. No such unlikeness, however, appears to exist; and all this oppositeness probably implies, not so much the outcome of a human experience entirely independent of Aryan experience, as the outcome of an experience evolutionally younger than our own.

Yet that experience has been one of no mean order. Its manifestations do not merely startle: they also delight. 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 æsthetic value, the shapeliness and perfect taste of everything, the sense displayed of harmony in tints or colors,—all 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 and 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.

But the underlying strangeness of this world,—the psychological strangeness,—is much more startling than the visible and superficial. You begin to suspect the range of it after having discovered that no adult Occidental can perfectly master the language. East and West the fundamental parts of human nature—the emotional bases of it— are much the same: the mental difference between a Japanese and a European child is mainly potential. But with growth the difference rapidly develops and widens, till it becomes, in adult life, inexpressible. The whole of the Japanese mental superstructure evolves into forms having nothing in common with Western psychological development: the expression of thought becomes regulated, and the expression of emotion inhibited in ways that bewilder and astound. The ideas of this people are not our ideas; their sentiments are not our sentiments; their ethical life represents for us regions of thought and emotion yet unexplored, or perhaps long forgotten. Any one of their ordinary phrases, translated into Western speech, makes hopeless nonsense; and the literal rendering into Japanese of the simplest English sentence would scarcely be comprehended by any Japanese who had never studied a European tongue. Could you learn all the words in a Japanese dictionary, your acquisition would not help you in the least to make yourself understood in speaking, unless you had learned also to think like a Japanese,—that is to say, to think backwards, to think upside-down and inside-out, to think in directions totally foreign to Aryan habit. Experience in the acquisition of European languages can help you to learn Japanese about as much as it could help you to acquire the language spoken by the inhabitants of Mars. To be able to use the Japanese tongue as a Japanese uses it, one would need to be born again, and to have one's mind completely reconstructed, from the foundation upwards. It is possible that a person of European parentage, born in Japan, and accustomed from infancy to use the vernacular, might retain in after-life that instinctive knowledge which could alone enable him to adapt his mental relations to the relations of any Japanese environment. There is actually an English-man named Black, born in Japan, whose proficiency in the language is proved by the fact that he is able to earn a fair 
income as a professional storyteller
(hanashika).
But this is an extraordinary case. . . . As for the literary language, I need only observe that to make acquaintance with it requires very much more than a knowledge of several thousand Chinese characters. It is safe to say that no Occidental can undertake to render at sight any literary text laid before him—indeed the number of native scholars able to do so is very small;—and although the learning displayed in this direction by various Europeans may justly compel our admiration, the work of none could have been given to the world without Japanese help.