A Brill Calendar: June 27

Few educators seem to be aware of the unique value in totally immersing oneself in a subject; abstaining from any method.

A prime example is the greatest intellectual feat most mortals can already take pride in before reaching the age of seven years: fluency in a mother-tongue. Psychologists with an epistemological bent maintain that among all achievements needing both body and soul this one compares in complexity to winning a Nobel-Prize like a Swiss precision watch compares to an Egyptian water-clock. The history of the growth of knowledge and wisdom is replete with instances that frontiers of insight and understanding were advanced by individuals innocent of formal education.

The contribution to Japanese studies by Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn (Levkás, Ionian Islands June 27 1850 – Okubo, Japan September 26 1904; how sonorous ‘personalia’ can get!) is a point in case. An immigrant to the United States in 1869 after ‘salad days’ in Ireland, England and France, Hearn worked as a reporter, journalist and translator with increasing success in Society, crowned by an assignment from the elegant ‘Harper’s Magazine’, who sent him to Japan in 1890.

It is seldom that a love-affair with a civilization was so all-encompassing. Marrying a lady of high Samurai rank the year following, Hearn became an Imperial subject in 1895 and a Professor of English literature at the University of Tokyo in 1896. The Country of the Rising Sun couldn’t have wished for a better Cicerone explaining to the world-at-large Japanese culture, religion and literature. What proved to be his last treatise: ‘Japan – an Attempt at an Interpretation’ (1904) remains a milestone in Japanology. When Hearn began his romance with an exotic, hardly explored cultural and philosophical phenomenon, institutionalized education in the Japanese language was already well-established in the academic Leyden curriculum; but it couldn’t have continued to prosper without individuals immersing themselves in it like Lafcadio Hearn.