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LAFCADIO HEARN AND THE APPEAL OF SHINTO

By John Dougill, Emeritus Professor of Ryukoku University and owner of the Green
Shinto blog

The Greek connection

When the Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth century arrived in Japan, they were
sometimes baffled by the religious practices they encountered. The worship of trees,
rocks and amoral spirits seemed akin to devil-worship. It reminded them of the pagan
practices in Europe that the Church was determined to eradicate, for witch-hunts had
been carried out from around 1450.

Centuries later, after Japan’s Age of Isolation had come to an end, a different type of
European appeared. Amongst the newcomers were scholars with a keen interest in the
culture, including Ernest Satow, W.H. Aston and B.H. Chamberlain (Satow wrote of
Ancient Japanese Rituals and the Revival of Pure Shinto, W.H. Aston produced a
thick book on Shinto, and B.H. Chamberlain translated Kojiki). There was one other
person, however, who was singled out by the Japanese for his understanding of the
religion –Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904).

When Hearn came to Japan in 1890, he knew little of Shinto though from books he
had developed an interest in Buddhism. His discovery of indigenous beliefs in Japan
came after he took up residence in the provincial town of Matsue, where he had gone
to teach English. Within weeks he was writing to his friend Basil Hall Chamberlain
that the ancient gods had a strong hold on the local populace and that the whole
atmosphere was ‘full of magic’. Overall, it seemed to him like the pastoral life of
ancient Greece. Later in an essay on ‘Insects’ he was to write, ‘How marvelously
does this world resemble ancient Greece – not only in its legends and the more joyous
phases of its faith, but in all its graces of art and its sense of beauty’.1

Hearn had a strong affinity with Greece for several reasons, not the least of which
was that it was his birthplace (his mother was Greek, his father a medical officer in
the British Army stationed on a Greek island). Though he was brought up in Dublin
and abandoned by his mother at the age of four, Hearn identified with her and in later
life fondly embraced his Hellenic heritage. By contrast he rejected the Irishness of his
father, whom he disliked, hence the name change from young Paddy Hearn to the
adult Lafcadio. (His full name was Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the middle name being
derived from the Greek island of Levkos on which he was born.)

Hearn’s idealisation of ancient Greece can be seen as a reaction against the stifling
Catholicism of his upbringing. He had been brought up in the faith by a strict great-
aunt, who castigated him for reading a picture book of Greek myth and had it
censored by pencilling over the private parts. At the age of thirteen he was sent to a
Catholic boarding school in the north of England, but his unhappy time there gave
1
See ‘Insect Musicians’ in Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), quoted in Dawson, p.16
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him a life-long dislike of the religion, and in Japan he was to become a vociferous
opponent of missionaries.

In his sympathy for ancient Greece, Hearn was in tune with the spirit of the age,
promoted by such figures as Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Benjamin Jowett and
Walter Pater. They played a crucial role in the development of Hearn’s compatriot,
Oscar Wilde, who studied Greek as part of his Greats course at Oxford, which was
known as ‘the English Athens’. From Jowett he learnt to subscribe to Plato’s
advocacy of a speculative life, and from Pater he learned to appreciate Greek ideals
of beauty. Though very different in character from Wilde, Hearn too saw himself as
an aesthete in the Greek tradition.

In his early days in Matsue, Hearn portrayed Japan as a form of ancient Greece which
had miraculously survived into the modern age. He wrote admiringly of how the
populace practiced courtesy in everyday life and pursued beauty in their crafts. He
saw ordinary Japanese as superior to the self-centred populations of the West, and
believed that their honest, hardworking and cooperative character was bound up with
their beliefs. Western priests on the other hand were attempting to impose on the
country an alien way of thought based on individualism.

Hearn’s joy at discovering provincial Japan was typical of late Romanticism, in that it
was rooted in distaste for the ill effects of industrialization. By contrast, like Tolstoy
he idealised the simple faith of peasants living in tune with nature. He delighted in
their superstitious beliefs, and derided the inroads that materialism and utilitarianism
were making. Such was his apporeciation of the pre-industrial lifestyle that he railed
against the government in Tokyo for pursuing economic development. As far as
possible he avoided anything Western and took pleasure in things Japanese.

For Hearn’s contemporaries, Shinto was intellectually void for it lacked dogma,
doctrine and ideology. Not only was nature worship primitive, but the shrines were
crude with little artistic merit. Chamberlain for example quoted approvingly a visitor
to Ise Jingu who complained that the priests had nothing to show and made a great
fuss about showing it. Hearn by contrast took delight in the thrill of the new. His
explicit aim was to see into the heart of the Japanese, to which end he tried to live as
if one of them. Within a year he had a Japanese wife through an arranged marriage,
and he integrated into the local population with a mind to viewing things their way.
In this way he came to portray the culture through Japanese eyes, remarkable for a
time when it was widely assumed that Western values were inherently superior.

Animism
Hearn’s pagan sympathies stood him in good stead in the encounter with
Shinto. He took to the mythology in similar manner to the way he had taken to
Greek and Celtic myth as a child. He also had a natural affinity with animals
of all kinds, and was pleased to find that Japanese thought insects had souls.
In an essay in Kotto (1902) he wrote of ‘an old belief of mine – the belief that
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all being is One’2, and he went on to say he regarded dragon-flies, sand-
crickets, crabs and cicada as brothers and sisters. In all he wrote some 20
pieces about insects, many of them detailed studies based on personal
observation. He speculated on the number of atoms we might share with
them, and his fascination was such that he suggested we are all ‘human
insects’ fated to sing out like crickets in our brief time on earth. Moreover, as
his writings make clear, he had a deep love of nature, and his oldest son later
wrote of how toads, butterflies, bamboo sprouts and sunsets were among his
father’s best friends.

Hearn’s appreciation of nature extended to inanimate items, such as plants

and trees. Writing of the peculiar beauty of the blossom in Japan, Hearn
spoke of them having been so long admired and caressed that they have
acquired a life of their own: ‘’That trees, at least Japanese trees, have souls
cannot seem an unnatural fancy to one who has seen the blossoming of the
umenoki [plum] and the sakuranoki’ [cherry tree]. 3 In this he may have been
influenced by the tales of Celtic folklore, such as fairy-rings, told to him as a
child by his nanny from Connaught, and it would certainly have resonated
with his readings in Greek myth. Later when he lectured at Tokyo University,
he read out a Greek poem about a tree spirit as he thought it would strike a
chord with his students.4

In his first Japan book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Hearn included
a piece on his garden which is striking for the delight he took its elements,
including the rocks which he saw in Japanese terms as having a strong sense
of character. ‘Verily,’ he ends in syncretic vein, ‘even plants and trees and
stones, all shall enter into Nirvana.’5 No less an authority than the emeritus
professor of Tokyo University, Hirakawa Sukehiro, has stated that the ‘the
principal reason for Hearn’s appeal to the Japanese derives from Hearn’s
sympathetic understanding of Japanese animism.’6

In June 2017 a symposium on Hearn and Shinto was held at Meiji Jingu, at
which Makino Yoko, professor at Seijo University, spoke of Hearn’s
appreciation of shrines and suggested that he had much to teach
contemporary Japanese about the merits of their culture. She quoted the
following passage as an example:

Of all peculiarly beautiful things in Japan, the most beautiful are the
approaches to high places of worship or of rest, – the Ways that go
to Nowhere and the Steps that lead to Nothing…   Perhaps the
ascent begins with a sloping paved avenue, half a mile long, lined
2
Kotto, 1902, p.109
3
‘My first day in the Orient’ from Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Tuttle 1976, p.1
4
Hirakawa ed. Perspectives, p. 231
5
Quotation from Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, commonly called Nirvana Sutra
6
Hirakawa, ed. Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, p.38
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with giant trees. Stone monsters guard the way at regular intervals.
Then you come to some great flight of steps ascending through
green gloom to a terrace umbraged by older and vaster trees: and
other steps from thence lead to other terraces, all in shadow. 7

Hearn goes on to describe the architecture in remarkable detail, commenting

on how there is no artificial colour but plain wood which turns under the
influence of rain and sunshine to a natural grey, ‘varying according to surface
exposure from the silvery tone of birch bark to the somber grey of basalt.’  His
description of the honden is striking too, for he sees the ‘august house’ of the
kami as a haunted room, a spirit chamber, in which live ancestral ghosts.

Ancestor worship
The main speaker at the Meiji Jingu symposium was the Hearn scholar,
Hirakawa Sukehiro, who talked of the Japanese kinship with kami and the
spirit world. This appealed to Hearn as he had been obsessed with ghosts
since childhood (he remains best known in Japan for his ghost stories,
Kwaidan in particular). In addition, the evolutionary thinker, Herbert Spencer,
whom Hearn revered as the greatest genius of the age, said that the cult of
the dead lay at the root of all religion. That deceased family members should
become gods to their descendants made perfect sense to Hearn, who was
familiar with the notion from his readings in non-Christian cultures, and he
identified three premises underpinning ancestor worship: 1) The dead remain
in this world; 2) They become gods with supernatural power; 3) The
happiness of the dead depends on the respectful service of the living.

Hearn expanded on the subject in his last book, Japan, An Attempt at

Interpretation (1904), which is very different from the essays and impressions
in his other publications. The book is a treatise giving his considered view of
Japanese society as a whole, and in an earlier essay he had summarized his
thesis as follows: ‘Human society, in this most eastern East, has been held
together from time immemorial time by virtue of that cult which exacts the
gratitude of the present to the past, the reverence of the living for the dead,
the affection of the descendant for the ancestor.’ 8

In his book Hearn laid out three concentric circles of ancestral worship, which
bind Japanese to one another. At the family level there is the kamidana (spirit
shelf); at the communal level there is the ujigami (tutelary spirit); at the
national level there is emperor worship. The result for Hearn was a greater
sense of bonding and a greater potential for patriotism than in any other
country. More than a hundred years after its publication, the book remains the
most convincing study of the vital role of ancestor worship in Japanese
culture.

7
From ‘A Travellng Diary’ in Kokoro (1896), p.302-3
8
‘The Case of O-Dai’ in A Japanese Miscellany (1901), p.355
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Hearn’s sympathy with ancestor worship overwhelmed his earlier
appreciation of animism, such that he came to take on a partisan view of
State Shinto. In an editorial for the Kobe Chronicle, for which Hearn worked briefly
in 1894, he wrote a piece on ‘The Value of Shinto’. Noting that Shinto was much
older than Buddhism, he referred to it as ‘a religion of loyalty, of love of country, of
duty to the dead who founded her empire, of reverence to all who have shed their
blood in defence of the land. By some this cult has been called the Spirit of Yamato,
by others the worship of Yamato, by others the worship of ancestors, by missionaries
(who understand nothing at all about it) “heathenism”.’9

Hearn’s interpretation is here very much underpinned by his admiration of self-

sacrifice, which he viewed as the supreme human virtue. He even told his students
that sacrificing their lives for the emperor was their highest duty. He had long been
an admirer of ants, and in an essay on the subject he was fulsome in his praise for the
hierarchical and harmonious social structure in which individual ants worked for the
good of the whole. In addition, the collective was held together by sacrificial service
to the queen who ruled over them. When it came to Japan, Hearn took his cue on the
one hand from Kokugaku thinkers who wrote of the special nature of the Japanese,
and on the other from his mentor, Herbert Spencer, who invented the phrase ‘survival
of the fittest’ and advocated national strength. In this way Hearn became a keen
advocate of Japanese colonialism, not only as a means to spread the benefits of its
civilized values, but to protect the country by joining the ranks of the Europeans.
Such indeed was his enthusiasm for his adopted country (he had naturalized as
Yakumo Koizumi) that he became an ardent supporter of State Shinto and, ironically
given his family circumstances, even went so far as to side with Herbert Spencer in
maintaining that miscegenation with Westerners was inadvisable. The grateful
immigrant had turned into a zealous patriot.10

With historical hindsight it is evident that Hearn’s romantic idealism had led to
blind nationalism, much as was the case in Germany. He had overstepped
the mark, and it was a factor in his rift with the more level-headed Basil Hall
Chamberlain, who warned of the dangers of the invented religion: “Mikado-
worship and Japan-worship — for that is the new Japanese religion — is, of
course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon’, he noted. 11

Despite this it would be impossible to deny Hearn’s achievements. Indeed,

his accomplishments across a whole range of areas are simply astonishing
(particularly given that he was blind in one eye and myopic in the other). 12 His
pioneering work in spreading appreciation of Shinto, was in many ways a
century ahead of his time, for it was only towards the end of the twentieth

9
‘The Value of Shinto’ Nov 13, 1894; 1960, p. 102
10
See Roy Starrs ‘Lafcadio Hearn as Japanese Nationalist’ in Japan Review, 2006, 18:181-213
11
Chamberlain Things Japanese, (1939; 1985: p. 81)
12
Hearn’s achievements are far too numerous to list here, but an appreciation can be found in
‘Lafcadio Hearn, Flawed Genius’ (2018) by John Dougill on the academia.edu site.
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century that interest in Shinto grew among foreigners together with a more
sympathetic portrayal (Jean Herbert’s 1967 book, Shinto: At the
Fountainhead of Japan, can be seen as a forerunner).

Interestingly, Hearn depicted Shinto as primarily an ancestral religion,

whereas for modern admirers it is essentially a nature religion. Far from being
a ‘religion of loyalty’ in Hearn’s words, Shinto is portrayed as having universal
appeal, while State Shinto is written off as an unfortunate aberration. There
are moves too towards enhancing the religion’s green credentials, with the
protection of sacred groves regarded as an important example of
conservation. Yet it is well to be mindful that in recent years the government
of Shinzo Abe has sought to strengthen ties with such institutions as Ise Jingu
and Yasukuni Jinja, while Shinto rites will be a major focus in the inauguration
of the new emperor. In addition, the Association of Shrines (Jinja Honcho) is
in alliance with nationalist politicians and is supportive of policies that hark
back to State Shinto. Viewed in this light, Hearn’s assessment of Shinto may
not be as outmoded as it seems. It leaves one pondering if he would still write
of the appeal of Shinto in quite the same way if he were alive today.

Bibliography
Chamberlain, Basil Hall Japanese Things Vermont: Tuttle, 1971
Hearn, Lafcadio Exotics and Retrospectives, 1898
______________ Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894
______________ A Japanese Miscellany, 1901
______________ Kokoro, 1896
______________ Shadowings, 1900
Hirakawa, Sukehiro ed. Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives, Kent,
UK: Global Oriental, 2007
_______________ Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn Kent, UK: Global Oriental,
1997
King, Francis ed. Lafcadio Hearn, Writings from Japan UK: Penguin, 1984
Starrs, Roy ‘Lafcadio Hearn as Japanese Nationalist’ in Japan Review, 2006,
18:181-213
‘The Value of Shinto’ in Editorials from the Kobe Chronicle Tokyo: Hokuseido,
1960