Lafcadio Hearn: the foreign correspondent as double agent

This essay, published today by Engelsberg Ideas, is based on a lecture I gave in Dublin on April 12 as part of a series linked to an exhibition of new prints based on the Kwaidan ghost stories

This is a story of how a century and a quarter ago in Japan a remarkable Anglo-Irish-Greek foreign correspondent called Lafcadio Hearn pulled off an unusual feat: he became admired both by the readers he was writing for in America and Europe, who knew little about Japan, but also by the Japanese themselves, who knew rather a lot. He is no longer well known in Europe or America, except among specialists, but in Japan he remains an object of study, of admiration and even, for some, of veneration. How many foreign correspondents have a museum dedicated to them in the country about which they were writing?

This is even more surprising than it may sound. The best foreign correspondents often end up annoying or at least irritating their hosts. After all, their job is to report what is going on, warts and all, and few governments or elites like the warts to be pointed out. Very often, foreign correspondents are the hardest reporters for governments to influence or bully, except by kicking them out altogether, but when that is done their writing either ceases or becomes less well-informed. That is what has been happening in recent years as foreign reporters have been pushed out of China, many of them moving to Taipei or Singapore.

Foreign correspondents who stay a long time in the countries they are sent to, and really get to know their hosts well, tend to earn the suspicion of their editors back home who worry that they may “go native”. The fear is that their correspondent might become uncritical and cease to spot new stories. Plenty of excellent, long-standing correspondents have proved this fear unfounded. Nonetheless, perhaps the most notorious case of a correspondent who did go 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 yet infamously dismissed reports of famine in Ukraine as nonsense. In the 2019 movie, “Mr Jones”, about the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who did uncover the Holomodor, Duranty is depicted as a debauchee, even as a double agent.

Moreover, in stable times, which in the news business means dull ones, another danger looms: foreign correspondents often find themselves looking for strange and unusual tales, for those are the sort of stories most likely to interest their bosses back home and to entertain the reader or viewer. Few host countries, however, like to be turned into freak shows in which the exotic becomes central to their apparent identity. And the further away and less well-known the country is, the likelier that the freak-show treatment will be a common resort among foreign writers trying desperately to make a living.

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, it is to state an awkward reality, one that is particularly true for Japan and one which only well-informed and careful news editors back home can steer their correspondents away from. This is partly because Japan is a country replete with exotic stories, at least exotic from European and American points of view. But it is also because the quite conformist, don’t-rock-the-boat culture of Japan tends to mitigate against a lively news agenda, boosting the incentive to seek out the colourful.

The exoticiser who went 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 very different place to 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.

With the restoration of the Japanese emperor at the helm of government in 1868 in a coup d’etat and the establishment in 1889 of a new constitution with the country’s first ever parliament, albeit elected by a limited franchise, the country that greeted Hearn was also embarked on an urgent, determined strategy of modernisation and westernisation, so as to heal domestic divisions and to stave off foreign threats. But to westerners it was also wonderfully exotic, with an influx of Japan’s art and design to Europe bringing about the late 19^th century fad of Japonisme. You need only to watch Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera, The Mikado, to see how Japanese images could even then be translated and distorted in popular culture back home.

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 was 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 getting work as a journalist, becoming a translator of French literature, and later by writing on topics as varied as Creole cuisine, West Indian slavery and Louisiana voodoo. 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 Harpers magazine to travel to, and write about, Japan.

The essential principles of Hearn’s journalism, both in America and Japan, would be familiar to the many Tokyo correspondents today who are battling 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 temperament.

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 think of as a foreign correspondent as he fell out with his editors at Harpers quite soon after arriving in Japan, had to find work teaching English, and managed to make money from his writing chiefly through getting books published rather than from newspapers or magazines. 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. Quite a few books had by the 1890s already been written about Japan by Britons, Americans and other foreigners who had arrived before him, whether as diplomats, teachers, engineers or government advisers, but most were in effect travellers’ tales rather than in-depth studies. 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. Through his books “Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life” (1896), “In Ghostly Japan” (1899) and “Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things” (1904) he conveyed an image of a country steeped in the supernatural, one that blended the animist ideas of its Shinto religion with the more psychological spiritualism of Buddhism, and in which the real and the imagined seemed sometimes hard to tell apart.

From Marco Polo to Sofia Coppola

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. What Hearn also told them was that the Japanese were a people one could admire, one could be interested in, but whom one could never really understand properly.

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. Arguably, he idealised Japan while always feeling it was impenetrably different from the Europe and America that he knew.

Hearn was far from the first to view Japan as both different and exotic. Indeed 600 years earlier another sort of foreign correspondent, the Italian Marco Polo, had reported the existence of a country he called “Zipangu”, or the land of gold, which he had never visited but had been told about during his visit to Beijing. “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 his ghostwriter, Rustichello da Pisa, for bigging up the rumour his employer had brought home with him.

In modern times Polo’s “Zipangu” also came in handy as a term of abuse, by a group of Japanese who became angered by what they saw as stereotyped, misleading coverage in the New York Times in the mid-1990s by that newspaper’s Tokyo correspondent, Nicholas Kristoff. 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.

This was, admittedly, a period in which Japan’s economy and hence self-confidence had taken quite a dive. 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, that 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.

Yet even at a less unsettled time, early in the new millennium, there came further evidence that a view of Japan as an exotic, even amusingly strange place could be unwelcome. I will illustrate this with an anecdote connecting Peter, now Lord, Mandelson and the filmmaker Sofia Coppola.

In 2003, just 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, came out I found myself attending a meeting of British and Japanese officials, scholars and businesspeople taking place in Britain and chaired by Peter Mandelson. 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 of the Brits nodded and chipped in. The Japanese looked stony-faced.

Now, for some of the Japanese attendees the blank reaction might have been embarrassment or just caused by jetlag. But I realised 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 audiences and critics for the most part did not appreciate this. Some even found it racist.

Why Hearn’s stereotyping and racism were welcome

On the face of it, Hearn’s depictions of Japan in the late 19^th century might also have gone down like a lead balloon: indeed, they may have done so at first with Japanese diplomats trying to persuade westerners and the Japanese public alike that their country did not deserve to suffer under “unequal treaties”. This was a country seeking to modernise itself, after all, and to make itself strong and sufficiently unified to fight wars against China (1895) and Russia (1904-05). Hearn did express some patriotic support for such Japanese nationalism, but at the same time his books idealised the Japan that was being left behind by a modernisation of which he disapproved.

Moreover, his view of Japan emphasised what he saw as inherent racial differences compared with westerners rather than differences of circumstance 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: crucially, he did not use his racial stereotyping to criticise 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 modernisation. He showed what might be said to be a vital characteristic of the foreign correspondent as double agent: a strong sympathy for those about whom he was writing.

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 stabilising force. Just as the British historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger wrote of “The Invention of Tradition” in Victorian Britain, so the leaders of late 19^th century Japan were reaching back to imperial rule and to the Shinto religion to shore up, some would say create, 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. Not only did he help spread a positive view of his adopted country to his European and American readers, but he also helped reinforce the message the government was seeking to send to Japan itself.

This may explain why, without apparent qualifications, Hearn landed a job teaching English literature in Tokyo Imperial University, which is still today (shorn since 1945 of the word “imperial”) the country’s leading educational institution. Helping Hearn to stay in Japan and in a more prominent position than in his previous provincial teaching posts may have felt like a good idea. 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.

Something similar happened again, half a century later. 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. But more remarkable is the fact that this book, by an American author who had never visited Japan, had by the late 1990s sold more than 2.3 million copies in Japanese translation, more than six times as many as it had sold in English.

Defeat had brought a period of questioning of Japan’s identity similar to that in the last decades of the Nineteenth century. So like Hearn’s books, Benedict’s study provided a sort of validation as well as offering an outsider’s view to an uncertain people. 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 generalisations, the most famous of which is of Japan being a “shame culture”, while the West is a “guilt culture”.

Plenty of academics have criticised Benedict’s generalisations, just as Basil Hall Chamberlain criticised Hearn’s. However, both Benedict and Hearn have nonetheless been embraced, notably by the strain of nationalist thought known as Nihonjinron: the study of Japaneseness, which began in 19^th century Japan but which flourished especially after 1945. Generalise 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.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the Anglo-Irish-Greek foreign correspondent, became a successful late 19^th century double agent because he showed sympathy for Japanese society rather than lecturing or criticising, because he helped shore up Japan’s sense of identity during a period of turbulence, and because his work supported the notion 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. The vividness of his writing has undoubtedly also 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.