Ohio Connections
Japan, Cincinnati, and the Arts: Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo)
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The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer |
The works of writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn are well known in Japan, where he is also known as Koizumi Yakumo. Less often appreciated, however, is the impact that his works have had outside of his adopted home country. By making Japanese culture accessible to the West, his stories planted the seeds of cross-cultural friendship in his readers’ hearts.
Over the course of his life, Hearn’s winding path led him to live in no fewer than five countries. His middle name is a tribute to his birthplace, the Ionian island of Lefkada in Greece, where he was born in 1850 to Sergeant Major Charles Bush Hearn of County Offaly, Ireland, and Rosa Antoniou Kassimati, a Greek woman. His family relocated to Ireland when he was two years old, and after a childhood spent being shuffled between relatives, his family sent him off to the United States at the tender age of 19. Impoverished upon his arrival, he spent two years in New York before settling in Cincinnati; there he befriended an English printer who helped him find journalism work. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer recognized his talent as a writer and hired him as a reporter in 1872. He later wrote for the Cincinnati Commercial before moving to New Orleans, where his writings have been credited with developing the city’s exotic mystique. Signing on with Harper’s Publishing Co., he spent two years as a correspondent in on the Caribbean island of Martinique, and it was Harper’s that sent him to Japan in 1890.
Due to a contract dispute, Hearn broke with Harper’s soon after his arrival in Japan. He went on to teach English at middle schools in Shimane and Kumamoto Prefectures, and later at Tokyo Imperial University and Waseda University. He adopted Japanese dress and married a Japanese woman, Koizumi Setsu, with whom he had four children. And he continued his writing: he wrote for the English language Kobe Chronicle and completed several novels and story collections about Japan and its culture.
While his work, including Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903), has been embraced within Japan itself, the impact of Hearn’s writing on the West is not always fully recognized by the Japanese people. Published at a time when Japanese visual art was a novelty in the West, works such as Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896) nurtured many readers’ interest in and sympathy toward Japan, conveying the mind and the soul of the Japanese people to his readers in the United States and around the world. But the significance was not lost on Japan’s envoys to the rest of the world. In his memoir My Fifty Years in Diplomacy, Kijuro Shidehara, the 44th prime minister of Japan, related a story about an American woman who had been moved by Hearn’s work. Shidehara lamented how little the Japanese people knew of the impact of Hearn’s writing abroad.
It is an impact that continues to this day. In November 1989, Kinji Tanaka, President of the Japan Research Center of Cincinnati, established the Lafcadio Hearn Society USA to strengthen ties between researchers in the United States and Japan, support research in Cincinnati, and introduce Hearn’s life and work to new generations in both countries. The Society has reached out to its Japanese counterpart, Yakumokai, inviting them to Cincinnati for a joint workshop. As interest in Hearn’s work endures in both the United States and Japan, it is clear that his legacy has enriched the bonds of friendship between the two countries.