The Irish museum that's big in Japan

EUROPEANS visiting Japan for the first time are invariably struck by just how alien it all is. All the usual points of reference are missing: language, script, the easy familiarity with which we conduct all those everyday interpersonal exchanges.

So how much more disorientating must it have been for Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, arriving there as a newspaper correspondent in 1890?

Hearn's father was an Anglo-Irish army surgeon, Charles Hearn, who was stationed on the Greek Ionian island of Lefkada when his son was born. His mother was Rosa Antonia Kassimati, though it's not clear whether his parents ever married. At the age of two, the family moved to Dublin, where he was brought up.

Lafcadio Hearn was 40 when he arrived in Japan. He'd spent most of his adult life in the United States, where he'd been married to a black woman, an illegal act at the time.

On arriving in Japan Hearn took a teaching job in Matsue in the west of the country. He married Setsu Koizumi (above, with Lafcadio and their child, Kazuo) and became a naturalised Japanese citizen, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo.

By the end of the 19th century he'd become the most influential foreign observer of the folklore and pre-industrial culture of his adopted country, producing Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan(1894), Japanese Fairy Tales(1898) and A Japanese Miscellany(1901), amongst more than a dozen books. He died in 1904, aged just 54.

President Mary Robinson recognised this extraordinary Irishman when she visited the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum and his book-lined home in Matsue during a state visit to Japan in 1995. Few enough Irish visitors pass this way. But for the Japanese, these are still the two most popular tourist attractions in the region.

The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum, Shiomi-nawate Street, Matsue, Shimane

[ go@irish-times.ie ]