Articles from the Smithsonian
- Enjoying reading about the life of Lafcadio Hearn as well as his own accounts of Japan:
The son of a Greek mother and an Irish father, born in Greece in 1850, Hearn grew up in Ireland. As a young man, he emigrated to Ohio, where he became
a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer—until he was fired for marrying a black woman. The couple ended the marriage, which had never been recognized, and he spent ten years reporting from New Orleans, then two more in Martinique. In 1890, he moved to Japan, about which he intended to write a book and where he found work as a teacher at a secondary school in Matsue.
Tiny in stature, nearly blind and always conscious of being an outsider, Hearn discovered in Japan his first experience of community and belonging. He married a Japanese woman, assumed financial responsibility for her extended family, became a citizen, had four children and was adopted into another culture, about which he continued to write until his death in 1904. Though Hearn took a Japanese name, Yakumo Koizumi, he saw himself as a foreigner perpetually trying to fathom an unfamiliar society—
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Serene-Japan.html#ixzz271iDBQ60
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