Latest news with #LafcadioHearn
Daily Mirror
6 days ago
- Science
- Daily Mirror
Worst volcano disasters in history from 92,000 deaths to haunting last photograph
As Russia's Krasheninnikov Volcano erupts for the first time in 600 years, the Mirror takes a look at some of the worst volcanic disasters in human history Today, for the first time in 600 years, Russia's Krasheninnikov Volcano has erupted, with an ash plume reaching up to six kilometres (3.7 miles) expelled overnight. Shocking photographs show smoke billowing several miles high from the peak, while a large ash cloud drifted towards the Pacific Ocean. This comes after an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Russia's Far East coast on Wednesday, July 30. The monster quake flooded a fishing port with tsunami waves, where terrified residents were seen fleeing from buildings in panic. Multiple injuries have been reported. It's understood that the quake set off Klyuchevskoy, the area's most active volcano, and also sent tsunami waves across to Japan, Hawaii, and the US West Coast. As a number of areas face tsunami alerts, the Mirror takes a look at some of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. It comes after horror moment a Japan tsunami sends gigantic wall of water smashing into coast. Tambora, Indonesia (1815) In April 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted. This was to be the worst eruption in 10,000 years and would ultimately claim the lives of 92,000 people, as per Oregon State University. Around 10,000 of these individuals died as a direct result of the violent explosion, with 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of deadly gases, dust, and rock spewed out into the surrounding atmosphere. The rest died as a result of the catastrophic aftereffects, with the destruction leading to widespread disease and a devastating famine. The impact of Mount Tambora was so great that it could be felt across the world, with ash dispersing far and wide, resulting in calamitous climate disruptions. The following year, 1816, was referred to as 'The Year Without A Summer', and subsequent crop failures in the Northern Hemisphere led to severe food shortages. Krakatoa, Indonesia (1883) In August 1883, Krakatoa, a volcano in the Sunda Strait, a body of water which runs between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, erupted with the power of a 200-megatonne bomb. Some 36,417 people died, with the eruption directly resulting in a 30m tsunami, which obliterated 165 coastal villages on both Java and Sumatra. The scale of such a tragedy is difficult to fathom. As per the Natural History Museum, in the months that followed, the entire Earth cooled by an average of 0.6°C, while the particles of ash gave the moon an eerie bluish appearance in certain parts of the globe. Mt. Pelee, Martinique ( 1902) The vibrant port city of Saint-Pierre, Martinique, was once referred to as the 'Paris of the West Indies', with the 19th-century writer Lafcadio Hearn once describing it as "the sensation of some happy dream." Then, in the spring of 1902, Mt. Pelée awoke from its slumber. On the morning of May 8, scorching ash came down the mountain at speeds of 300 miles per hour, destroying Saint-Pierre, with the hellish avalanche claiming the lives of an estimated 27,000 people. According to only two individuals survived the horror, including the prisoner Ludger Sylbaris, who survived thanks to the protection of his partially underground cell. In his later career as a circus attraction, Ludger earned the nickname "the man who lived through Doomsday". Ruiz, Colombia (1985) As previously reported by the geophysics magazine Eos, the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz volcano was so devastating that it changed the way Colombian volcanologists approached their field of study, knowing that public education was required to prevent further tragedies. As told in Colombian filmmaker Rubén Mendoza's harrowing documentary El valle sin sombras (The valley without shadows), survivor Gabrielina Ferruccio recalled how, when ash began falling on the town of Armero on November 12, 1985, she headed to see her local priest for advice. She was told to 'enjoy this beautiful show, it will never be seen again.' At around 6 pm that evening, fellow survivor Edilma Loiza shared how 'a fire truck went through town telling everybody to stay at home, to not leave home or panic.' Just five hours later, all hell broke loose, with the eruption causing catastrophic avalanches of landslides and debris flows to engulf Armero. In a town of 30,000 citizens, 25,000 lost their lives. One of the most haunting stories to emerge in the aftermath was that of 13-year-old Omayra Sánchez Garzón, who was stuck for 60 hours in the debris of her ruined house, her legs pinned in such a way that rescue would have been impossible. Photojournalist Frank Fournier photographed the young girl in the final hours of her life. The powerful picture has been used to highlight reported government failures to respond adequately to the volcano's threat. Unzen, Japan (1792) The eruption of Mount Unzen in May 1792 is understood to be the most deadly volcanic eruption in the history of Japan, with the death toll reaching a devastating 14,300. In the months leading up to the mass tragedy, those in the Unzen area experienced a number of earthquakes and eruptions, which ultimately culminated in a 6.4 magnitude earthquake, as per EBSCO. This violent earthquake led to the collapse of a volcanic dome, resulting in landslides pouring debris into the Ariake Sea. Large volumes of water were displaced, triggering tsunami waves as high as 187 feet (57 meters). Coastal towns suffered the brunt of the nightmarish tsunami, with Shimabara, Higo, and Amakusa suffering the most. Those who visit the region today can still see the landscape scar from the Mayuyama landslide all these years later, a haunting reminder of the lives lost.
Irish Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Celebrating the Irish writer whose ghost stories still grip Japan
Expo 2025, the sprawling world exposition in the Japanese city of Osaka, is bounded by Sou Fijimoto's Grand Ring, the largest wooden structure in the world and designed as a symbol of unity in diversity. Just inside the entrance to the Expo is another ring, Joseph Walsh 's six-metre tall Magnus Rinn, a monumental sculpture made of bronze and oak. Walsh's sculpture stands outside the Irish pavilion, itself composed of three intersecting circular structures based on the Celtic triskele and clad in fir timber. The French pavilion features displays of haute couture and luxury goods and the American is themed on space, but the Irish one is notable for its restraint. The three spaces inside on the ground floor are dark and the first features an installation based on the sights, sounds and smells of Ireland, with some living bog at the centre. The second shows objects that connect Ireland and Japan, and the third is a performance space that looks at creative collaboration between the two countries. When Taoiseach Micheál Martin visited the pavilion on Thursday, he lingered over an exhibition upstairs of prints based on the Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost stories. Once as famous as Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe, Hearn is still widely read in Japan, where he was also known as Yakumo Koizumi. READ MORE [ Lafcadio Hearn, a profoundly homeless world-class writer Opens in new window ] 'Japan and Ireland share a deep respect for the past and the love of culture, literature and music, along with a deep connection to nature. We are both storytellers, and in this pavilion, we tell the story of Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn came to Japan as a journalist in 1890 and wrote about life in Japan for a western audience, keen to know more about this wonderful country,' the Taoiseach told a reception in the pavilion later. At 8am every morning, millions of Japanese television viewers start their day watching the latest 15-minute episode of the current asadora, or morning drama. Each drama runs for six months with about 150 episodes on the national broadcaster NHK, where it has been among the most popular shows since 1961. Every series features a woman who overcomes adversity to find fulfilment, often inspired by the lives of real historical figures. The next series is The Ghost Writer's Wife, loosely based on the life of Setso Koizumu, who was married to Hearn. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 on the island of Lefkada near Ithaca to an Irish father and a Greek mother. When he was two, his mother brought him to Ireland, where she discovered that Hearn's father had left her for another woman. Hearn's mother soon returned to Greece with a new partner and she left her son behind in Dublin to be raised by his great-aunt Sarah Brenane, a wealthy widow with no experience of bringing up children. She sent him to school in England but when she fell on hard times, he found himself in low company on the backstreets of London before gaining a passage to America. He moved to Cincinnati where he made an impression as a journalist who wrote vivid accounts of grisly crimes. But marrying a black woman led to his dismissal and he moved to New Orleans, where his accounts of the high life and the low life of the city attracted the attention of Harper's Monthly, which hired him and later sent him to Japan as a correspondent. Six years after he arrived in the country, Hearn became a Japanese citizen, adopted a Japanese name and took his wife's family name. His most famous book is Kwaidan, a collection of supernatural stories based on Japanese folk tales but he was also as a journalist a perceptive observer of Japan's modernisation. 'Unlike contemporaneous Western Japanologists, he understood that Japan was becoming westernised, not western: it would take what it required from the West but remain quintessentially Japanese,' wrote Hearn's biographer Paul Murray. 'His vision was double-edged, illuminating both Japan and the West, the latter seen as morally inferior to a Japan which embodied to him many of the virtues of ancient Greece. His scepticism about the civilising mission of the West, evident in his Cincinnati journalism, turned into downright hostility in his Japanese work.' A former Irish ambassador to South Korea, Murray discovered Hearn in a Tokyo bookshop when he was a junior diplomat in Japan. The Embassy's new home at Ireland House Tokyo, which the Taoiseach opened this week, has a library named after Hearn. Ten years ago, the Little Museum of Dublin staged an exhibition and a programme of events about Hearn's life and work . Now that he is about to become a star of Japanese morning television drama, perhaps it's time for this remarkable figure to become better known in the country where he spent his childhood.
Irish Examiner
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Expo 2025 in Japan a curious beast as Ireland joins nations vying to show off heritage
The Expo 2025 in Japan is a curious beast. One Irish official likened it to a crossover between the National Ploughing Championships and the Eurovision, with countries from across the globe represented, but each trying to outdo the other with bespoke pavilions showing off their national culture and heritage. The event itself takes place once every five years and runs for about six months, with Osaka the most recent city to play host. The venue is a mammoth one, with a gigantic, 2km-long raised wooden platform encircling each of the individual pavilions. The raised platform is the largest wooden structure in the world. When Taoiseach Micheál Martin arrived in the sweltering Osaka heat, he was led underneath the sprawling platform and quickly escorted to the cooler environs of the Ireland pavilion. Taoiseach Micheál Martin at the Expo 2025 Pavilion in Japan. Ireland's exhibit includes a cool black room, illuminated only by spotlights, with the sounds of Irish wildlife and a diorama of a bog from back home. As people move through the exhibit, it transitions into a literary and cultural museum of sorts, with books by famed Irish author Lafcadio Hearn — little known in Ireland but a significant influence on literature in Japan. A visit to Ireland's pavilion culminates in a 16-minute avant-garde trad performance, with interpretive dance and dread-inducing accordion, before it returns to a more céilí-like sound. People working at the site itself were at pains to point out how popular the pavilion is among locals in Osaka, recalling that a St Patrick's Day parade had drawn enormous crowds. Budget of €16.8m The overall budget allocated to the project is €16.8m, which includes construction of the pavilion but also takes account of staffing costs, fit-out, and programming across the full six-month runtime. Other pavilions also proved a hit, with the French entry taking guests on a tour throughout the country's fashion industry, with walls lined with Louis Vuitton suitcases. During his walk around the Expo, the Taoiseach ducked into the European Union's pavilion, where he took some offence to Cork not being included in a photo-booth experience of major European cities. Turning to his guide when his only Irish option was Dublin, Mr Martin said: 'Ah for God sake, is that all you have? Michael McGrath will have to be contacted." On his way out, he was ambushed by Europa, the EU's Expo mascot, and nabbed a photo alongside her. Taoiseach Micheál Martin on a visit to Expo 2025 in Osaka yesterday. As the evening drew on, guests flocked to the Ireland pavilion for a trad session, with local politicians, diplomats, and other dignitaries eagerly anticipating the evening's main event. Not a speech by the Taoiseach, but a trailer for a new Japanese morning programme based on the life of the aforementioned Lafcadio Hearne and his wife Yakumo Koizumi. While the trailer came to a close, the actor portraying Hearne made his appearance and walked up to the stage. Tommy Bastow, known for his appearances in hit series Shogun,will take on the role. The audience was transfixed, with smartphones rising in the air to catch him making his brief speech, where he touched on his own heritage, citing one of his grandparents having come from Mayo. As the speeches wound down and music picked up, glasses of Guinness and half-ones of Clonakilty whiskey were poured, before a drone show ended the evening with directions for guests to depart the park. A curious beast indeed.
AllAfrica
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- AllAfrica
Lafcadio Hearn: the foreign correspondent as double agent
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 not only 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 museums dedicated to them in the countries 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, if they 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. Walter Duranty. Photo: Ukrainian World Congress 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 farther 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, the temptation to focus on the odd is – to state an awkward reality – one that is particularly true for Japan and one that 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 – exotic at least 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 colorful. 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 place very different from 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 modernization and Westernization, 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 19th 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, 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 Harper's 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 Harper's 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 travelers' 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. Lafcadio Hearn (Yakumo Koizumi), his wife Setsuko Koizumi and one of their children. Photo: Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum 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. 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. From Marco Polo to Sofia Coppola 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 idealized 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 Polo's ghostwriter, Rustichello da Pisa, for bigging up the rumor his employer had brought home with him. In modern times Polo's 'Zipangu' also came in handy when used 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 Kristof. 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, which 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 realized 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 19th century might also have gone down like a lead balloon. Indeed, they may have done so at first with Japanese diplomats who were 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 modernize 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 idealized the Japan that was being left behind by a modernization 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 criticize 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 modernization. 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 stabilizing force. Much the way the British historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger portrayed The Invention of Tradition in Victorian Britain, the leaders of late 19th 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 at 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. 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 generalizations – the most famous of which is of Japan being a 'shame culture' while the West is a 'guilt culture.' Plenty of academics have criticized Benedict's generalizations, just as Basil Hall Chamberlain criticized 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 19th century Japan but which flourished especially after 1945. Generalize 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 19th century double agent because he showed sympathy for Japanese society rather than lecturing or criticizing, 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. Formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the Japan Society of the UK, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the International Trade Institute. This essay, originally published by Engelsberg Ideas, is based on a lecture he gave in Dublin on April 12 as part of a series linked to an exhibition of new prints based on the Kwaidan ghost stories. Asia Times is republishing with kind permission.
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
Ireland: Creativity Connects People
The design of this pavilion is inspired by the triskele, an ancient Celtic pattern symbolizing the Trinity, as, when viewed from above, it resembles three interlocking circles. The exhibition is divided into three spaces each with its own theme: Ireland, Ireland's relationship with Japan, and the spirit of creative collaboration. Together with performers, visitors can experience Irish music and Irish dancing, with its unique steps, in a circular hall surrounded by a giant screen. An exhibition about Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish-born writer active in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, will also be held for a limited period. The Ireland pavilion is located in the Empowering Lives zone. ( See the official map for details.) Ireland marks its national day on Saturday, June 14, at the Expo National Day Hall. Outside the pavilion is the circular sculpture Magnus Rinn by Irish artist Joseph Walsh. (© ) (Originally published in Japanese. Reporting and text by Uchiyama Ken'ichi and Photographic assistance by Kuroiwa Masakazu of 96-Box. Banner photo © .)
