by John E. Philips (special to The Japan Times)

    On coming to Japan I found an old face in a new place.  I had long known of Lafcadio Hearn, but his contribution to Japanese studies was something new to me.  Here I found that he had applied his powers of sympathetic insight to another society far across the Pacific, but that his reception was different.

    Lafcadio Hearn is a familiar name in the field of Afro-American folklore.  He was one of the first white scholars to take Afro-American studies seriously, and to search the folklore for something other than cute animal tales and patronizing dialect songs.

    White scholars who followed his lead found cause to praise him.  J. L. Dillard in his famous work "Black English" lists him among white southern authors who were native speakers of that dialect, despite the fact that he was an immigrant from Europe.

    Black scholars also quote his collections, as Leroi Jones did in his work Blues People.  But another attitude shows in the same book.  Jones refers to the white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, that literary and artistic flowering of black New York in the 1920s as "a generation of Lafcadio Hearns."  Here he shows his distaste for those who gain vicarious experiences from the "exotic" culture of others, and who expose what was created as an emotional insulation from the dominant white culture, dragging it back into public view.  Hearn's very success in detailing the mysteries of black society caused resentment.

    Here in Japan I found a different reaction: Hearn had become Koizumi Yakumo, the gaijin who understood Japan.  Every schoolchild had heard the tale of this remarkable immigrant who had applied his powers of sympathetic insight to Japanese society.  He had published explanations of Japanese culture and customs which were still in print and which were still studied, and he had done collections of Japanese folklore which still delighted and amazed both scholars and lay readers.  He had even been accorded the rare privilege of Japanese citizenship.

    These very different reactions to the ability and works of this singularly insightful author tell us much about these two nearly impenetrable societies, the Japanese and the Afro-American.  They are both difficult to fathom, but for entirely different reasons.

    Afro-Americans live in a society created largely for the needs and desires of white people.  Surrounded by a hostile majority, whose usual response to their presence was either hostile violence or malicious ignorance, with occasional patronizing amusement, blacks sought to give dignity and meaning to their lives by creating a meaningful culture sheltered from those who considered them at best either a problem or a nuisance.

    Japan, in contrast, had a great desire to be understood, but little ability to explain itself.  Centuries of isolation had left a culture in which unspoken and unquestioned assumptions predominated.  The idea of doing things in other ways had been forgotten and the necessity of explaining why things were done the way they were was equally gone.  Thus newly internationalized Meiji Japan found that creating comprehension of itself among other societies was not easy.  Hearn's efforts were welcomed.

    Was there a connection, I wondered, between Hearn's roles as the insightful outsider on two continents?  Although I had long grown accustomed to seeing his name in footnotes in works of Afro-American studies, I had not an inkling that he had crossed the ocean to Japan, let alone that he had made an even bigger mark here than in his first adopted country.  Japanese students, although familiar with both his names and often familiar with his works, were quite surprised that he had earlier made a reputation as a collector of black tales and songs.

     Intrigued, I visited the reference room of the Tohoku University library.  I consulted the massive, standard reference source, the Dictionary of American Biography, 1932 edition.  There in the entry "Hearn, Lafcadio" I found an explanation for the connection between his American studies and his Japanese studies.  Of a long sojourn in Martinique, and the women that Hearn loved there, it said, "It is possible that he found in these golden women of an inferior race a milieu he could frequent without pain, and that this was a major part of the lure that kept him a romantic wanderer."

    Was this it?  Was a fetish for "women of an inferior race" the real secret of Hearn's life in Japan and his marriage to a Japanese?  The DAB had mentioned a scandal in Hearn's earlier life in Cincinnati, where "he lived openly with a mulatress, and was only prevented from marrying her by the law against miscegenation."  Japan had no such laws.

    The DAB had been written long before World War II, civil rights and the acknowledgment of the respect to which the non-white peoples of the world had long ago rightfully been entitled.  Its comments thus only reflected the racism of its day.  But surely that racism itself, which maligned both Japanese and blacks in one breath, was one connection between Lafcadio Hearn's lives on two continents.

    Black Americans and Japanese area two very different and misunderstood peoples.  Despite their very different cultures and histories, they have much in common, besides Hearn's interest in them.

    Japanese and black Americans are the only major non-white peoples in the developed, industrial countries.  They thus share an urban, wage-earning, modern lifestyle, yet they are still too often considered outsiders and interlopers in an advanced economy, Japanese for allegedly having imitated rather than created industrial development,, and black Americans for allegedly having been pulled along by the inertia of American industrialization, rather than having contributed to it themselves.  The real contributions of both groups are thus ignored.

    In the past 40 years of so there has been gradually an increased acceptance of both groups.  Japanese have won respect for their hard work, the quality and efficiency of their manufacturing and management techniques, and for the beauty of their traditional arts.  Black Americans have compelled an often reluctant America to recognize their talents, not only in sports, music and literature, but also in medicine, science, space travel, diplomacy and politics.  America has come to realize that the achievements of such people as Ralph Bunche, Granville Woods and Dr. Charles Drew were not necessarily exceptional, and that given ample opportunity, other black Americans might make similar contributions.

    Both Japanese and black Americans have achieved the dubious distinction of the status of "honorary white" in South Africa.  This is, of course, due to the fact that both come from advanced, developed economies, and South Africans are anxious to court their capital and expertise.  It perhaps proves the validity of the Brazilian saying "Money whitens," but it means little or nothing to black Americans, who know white people better than to take much pleasure in being honorary ones.

    Far more important is the roles that these two people could play in bringing greater understanding to this shrinking globe of ours.  As two such misunderstood and despised peoples, they should be in a better position to understand each other.  If they can sympathetically illuminate their countries to each other, perhaps they could serve as bridges for understanding between East and West, North and South.  Perhaps a good way for them to start opening up to outsiders would be to start opening up to each other.