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Negotiations of the transPacific, United States-Japan divide in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn and Yone Noguchi
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Negotiations of the transPacific, United States-Japan divide in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn and Yone Noguchi
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Content
NEGOTIATIONS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC, U.S.-JAPAN DIVIDE
IN THE WRITINGS OF
LAFCADIO HEARN AND YONE NOGUCHI
by
Tim Yamamura
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES)
December 2005
Copyright 2005 Tim Yamamura
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Table of Contents
Abstract iii
Introduction 1
Two “Interpreters”: A Brief Biography of Hearn and Noguchi 8
One Interpretation 13
Chapter 1: Re-interpreting “The Interpreter” 18
Hearn as “The Interpreter” 22
Hearn, Orientalism, and Heterogeneity 29
Hearn’s Kokoro 31
A Tom Heart 37
Chapter 2: Situating the “Homeless Snail” 46
Between Asia and Asian America 47
Walking the Walk, Talking the Talk 50
Between Resistance and Accommodation 60
Noguchi and Early Japanese America 72
Conclusion: Notes Towards a Trans-Pacific, Japanese-American Hybridity 75
Heam: A Wandering Self 78
Noguchi: The “Dual Citizen” 85
Hybrid Subjects 92
Bibliography 96
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iii
Abstract
Lafcadio Hearn and Yone Noguchi were both writers of the late-nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries who crossed the Pacific - with Hearn leaving America
for Japan and Noguchi traveling in the other direction - and gained critical and
popular recognition for their works about the worlds that they encountered. This
thesis employs a transnational, cross-disciplinary approach and explores the
dynamic and ambivalent interchange between their respective writings and the
material conditions of their day. In light my reading of Hearn’s and Noguchi’s
negotiations of the perceived East-West, Japan-U.S. divide, this thesis argues that
both writers can be best understood as “hybrid figures,” torn between the polarities
of East and West, whose writings can reveal much about the beginnings of the
Japanese-American relationship and the emergence of modernity in the Pacific.
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1
Introduction
It is becoming increasingly clear that no understanding of the histories of
either the United States or Japan in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries is
complete without taking into consideration their political, military, cultural, and
artistic interactions with one another. Indeed, as David Palumbo-Liu has argued in
his 2002 book, Asia/America: Historical Crossing o f a Racial Frontier, the “very
shape and character” of the United States in the twentieth century is inseparable
from its contact and negotiations with Asia on both sides of the Pacific (3). This
includes Asia as Idea, as geographical locale, as well as the people and cultural
traditions that the marker delineates. He notes: “The defining mythos of America,
its ‘manifest destiny,’ was after all, to form a bridge westward from the Old World,
not ju st to the western coast of the North American continent, but from there to the
trans-Pacific of regions of Asia” (Palumbo Liu 2, Italics in Original). In other
words, once America had reached the Western coast of the continent at the end of
the nineteenth century, the country faced something of a crisis. With no more land
to move west to, the nation began to negotiate the complex question of whether or
not it should venture further into the Pacific Rim and expand its borders as well as
reflect upon what the ramifications of this move would be on American society1.
Of this, Palumbo-Liu writes:
1 It is important to note that Palumbo-Liu is addressing the subject o f A m erica’s interaction
with East Asia as a whole. This short thesis cannot have such breadth and will only focus
on U.S.-Japan relations as negotiated in literature. In spite o f this limitation, I feel that
Palumbo-Liu’s analysis is apt for my examination o f Japanese-A m erican ties considering
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2
While crossing over would advance the geopolitical and economic interests
of modem America, it would also test the social and cultural fabric of the
nation and its ability to accommodate a race heretofore deemed to be
radically different. If successful, this (selective) melding would be a central
part of the defining character of modem America: history had placed
America at the limit of the west coast and challenged it to cross over the
Pacific in order to fulfill its national destiny, away from the old world of
Europe and into Asia and modernity.
(2)
Certain assumptions of fundamental difference between races, widely accepted in
the beginning of the century, he continues, would pose the greatest obstacle to the
“success” of this potential colonialist project. He writes: “...this crossing over is
constantly compromised by the essential, racial separation of Asians from
‘Americans,’ a distinction buttressed by a belief system deeply ingrained in the
American imaginary which insists on the essential differences of racialized
peoples” (Palumbo-Liu 3). The challenge that America faced, then, by the given
logic of the times, would be a difficult, almost impossible one. How could the
Pacific divide be crossed, bridged, and Asia and its people “accommodated” into
the American body-politic if the East was seen as fundamentally different from the
West? How would this benefit the nation? What affect would this interaction have
on America’s societal “fabric” and on its cultural and racial identity? Such were
some of the questions being negotiated at multiple levels, including in America’s
cultural production, as the nineteenth century dimmed and the twentieth century
dawned.
the important and unique role that Japan played in Am erica’s interactions with Asia
throughout the twentieth century.
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3
At the same time, Japan was realizing that its future would be forever tied
with the West. With its “opening” at the hands of Admiral Perry and his “Black
Ships” in 1854, Japan had to contend with the outside world, especially America
and Europe, under terms that were often politically and economically unequal. Yet,
Japan was in something of a unique position in Asia: having not been colonized by
European Imperialist powers - a fate that many of its Asian neighbors had to
endure - the nation could, at least to some degree, control the nature of its relations
with the West.
Typically, Japan’s “modernization” during the Meiji Restoration (1868-
1912) is described as signaling a dramatic shift from the pre-modem modes of life
brought about through the importation of Western scientific, political,
technological, and cultural practices as well as a “symbolic shift of rule to the
emperor” (Gluck 17). These changes, intended largely to boost Japan’s
international stature, took shape under the banners of “progress” as seen in
ideological slogans such as bunmei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment” and
fukoku kydhei, “a wealthy nation and strong army.” As Komori Yoichi has argued
using Lacanian theory, through this process of “modernization,” Japan used the
West as a mirror by which it could gage its “progress” as a developing nation
seeking parity with “modem” countries. He writes:
[Japan’s] desire was to be a sovereign nation inside the sphere of
international law in order to become a great power like Western nations and
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4
to be a normal nation that could wage war against countries so as to make
them colonies (zokkoku).
(Komori 47)2
Thus, by feeding this colonial desire, and by partially creating itself in the West’s
image, Japan sought to “take its place” among the “civilized” nations of the world
through imperialist pursuits abroad.
Yet Japan’s modernization also fomented a national crisis of sorts: how
would these new political systems and cultural practices affect Japan’s character as
a nation? How would influence from the West change Japan’s sense of self, both as
a society and for individual Japanese? What effect would these developments have
on societal dynamics dictated by conceptions of space - public and personal - as
well as race, gender, and sexuality? Many members of Japanese society, and
including its artists and intellectuals, grappled with such questions at home and
abroad as their world transformed.
Moreover, Japan’s modernization project manifested itself not only through
importation from the West, but also with exportation of its own citizens abroad for
the “good of the nation.” In addition to Japan’s own imperialist exploits in Asia,
Eichiro Azuma’s important 2005 work, Between Two Empires: Race, History and
Transnationalism in Japanese America, has shown that some Japanese immigrants,
particularly upper-class intellectual elites, played a pivotal role as “colonists” in the
Japanese government’s plans to expand its burgeoning empire eastward, across the
2 This passage from K om ori’s work is my translation.
3 See Chapter 2 for more information on these Japanese artists and intellectuals in relation
to Noguchi.
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5
Pacific and into the American West through the “peaceful” means of embedding its
citizenry abroad - whose economic achievement, it was believed, would benefit
Japan. As a result, the conduct and treatment of Japan’s citizens in America, who
often times bore the brunt of American racism, became a prominent concern for
Japan’s government and society. Tied to Japan yet immersed in American society,
these Japanese - whose backgrounds varied immensely in terms of class, education,
occupation, and reason for going abroad - were “caught between the conflicting
and ideological and often repressive apparatuses of the two nation-states...”
(Azuma 6), and thus became actors in a larger geo-political drama.
From this brief historical overview, what I believe emerges is a sense of
interconnectedness between nations, cultures, peoples, and even scholarly
disciplines: that is, between Japan, America, and Japanese America as well as
Asian and Asian American studies. What these relationships underscore, then, is
the need for a transnational, cross-disciplinary approach to better understand this
complicated and often times turbulent transpacific Japanese-American story - one
that Asianists and Asian Americanists have begun to explore in recent works like
Azuma’s and that I see this study as a part of.
If this perceived transpacific, East-West divide was an important concern
for both America and Japan, then I believe that the writings of those who literally
crossed this gulf and grappled with these issues should prove a valuable site to
study early U.S.-Japan relations as well as the emergence of modernity in the
Pacific. The writings of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) and Yone Noguchi (1874-
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6
1947) can serve as such a site of inquiry. As I will explore in this thesis, the works
of both Noguchi and Hearn are fascinating and historically important examples of
how both the East-West, Japanese-American divide was perceived and negotiated.
Both men crossed the Pacific, albeit in different directions; Noguchi traveled from
Japan to America, where he lived for over a decade, and Hearn left America for
Japan, where he remained for 14 years until his death. Moreover, although Noguchi
was considerably younger and lesser known, both men were contemporaries and
wrote for wide and important audiences on their experiences abroad at the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. For such reasons, both men
were read alongside one another during their lives and were viewed as inhabiting
similar roles: they were “Interpreters of Japan” for the English-speaking world, in
particular America4 and to some degree England. For Heam, his fame came from
his writings on Japanese life, culture, customs, and from his re-workings of the
country’s legends and folklore. For Noguchi, he garnered his reputation by
becoming among the first Japanese to write and publish poetry in English. In
addition, he produced many volumes of criticism, essays, and fiction in his adopted
tongue while abroad as well as once he returned home. These works, intended to
4 It should be noted, as I will explore later in my biographical sketch o f Heam, that Heam
was, in fact, not an American. He was bom in Greece, raised in the United Kingdom and
held British citizenship until he took Japanese citizenship at the end o f his life. I have
chosen to read H eam as an “American W riter” only because his writing career began while
in America and he wrote primarily for American audiences. As I am interested in
examining what H eam and Noguchi can tell us about the Japanese-American story at the
turn o f the twentieth century, I feel Heam is an appropriate choice considering the audience
that he wrote for and the concerns he grappled with - concerns Am erica shared - as I will
show.
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“interpret” his country and culture for English-speaking audiences, went on to
influence the W est’s knowledge and perceptions of Japan, particularly for some of
America’s and Europe’s most important artists and intellectuals (as I will explore in
this thesis).
Also relevant is the fact that both men wrote during a time when what
would become the modern relationship between American and Japan was being
formed. The 1890’s in particular marked a period when both nations’ awareness of
the other grew as a result of their respective imperialist pursuits in the Pacific
(Hirobe 4). Japan seized Taiwan in 1894, then south Sakhalin and Kwantung
Province in northern China, both in 1905, and then Korea in 1910; Japan also
fought two successful wars against China in 1894-1895 and Russia in 1904-1905
that led to many of these colonial acquisitions. For the United States, its expansion
began with the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898, the latter
resulting in the Philippine-American War (1898-1913).
As a result, both nations began to recognize that their respective interests in
the Pacific were in conflict, and at different times and to varying degrees, began to
see the other as a rival. Moreover, anti-Asian sentiment in America, first aimed
largely at the Chinese, began to be directed at Japanese as well, particularly in the
beginning of the twentieth century; this is evinced by such acts as the segregation
of Japanese school children from San Francisco schools in 1906, the “Gentleman’s
Agreement” of 1907-08, which limited immigration from Japan, and Alien Land
Laws of 1913 and 1920, which barred Issei, or first-generation immigrants, from
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owning land, and finally the 1924 Immigration Act, which officially ended
Japanese immigration. In addition to making life more difficult for Japanese
immigrants in America, the effect of such policies was also felt across the Pacific,
giving rise to anti-American sentiment in Japan and greatly straining Japanese-
American relations (Azuma 83).5
As I will show, even if these political developments are not directly
addressed in the writings of Hearn and Noguchi - although in many cases they are
- their implications, in particular on matters of culture, race and national identity,
are very much being negotiated in their works. For such reasons, both the writings
of Hearn and Noguchi can help us better understand many of central issues that
characterized U.S.-Japan relations from the 1890’s to the 1920’s, the period that I
will explore here; I will discuss exactly how they will illuminate these issues in
greater detail after performing brief biographical sketches of both men.
Two “Interpreters”: A Brief Biography of Hearn and Noguchi
Lafcadio Hearn was bom in 1850 on the archipelago of the Ionian Islands
West of Greece. While Heam was still a child, his Anglo-Irish father left his Greek
mother and later legally annulled their marriage after leaving to serve in the
5 For histories o f Japan-U.S. relations and Japanese Am erican immigration, see the
aforementioned, Between Two Empires and Izumi H irobe’s Japanese Pride, American
Prejudice: Modifying the Exlusion Clause o f the 1924 Immigraion Act (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001). Also see The Poltics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement
in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion by Roger Daniels (Berkeley:
University o f California Press, 1962). For history o f the Issei, see Yuji Ichoka’s The Issei:
The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York: The Free
Press, 1988).
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Crimean War (1854-1856) for the British Army. Thus, Heam was permanently
separated from his mother - an event that haunted Heam throughout his life - and
was raised by an affluent Catholic great-aunt near Dublin, Ireland. It was there that
Heam spent the remainder of his youth, educated at numerous institutions in
Ireland and England.
At age 19, Heam left London for the United States, hoping to live with a
distant relative, in Cincinnati, Ohio. After performing numerous menial jobs, Heam
finally found a career as a writer, working for over a decade at newspapers and
magazines including the Cincinnati Inquirer, the Cincinnati Commerical as well as
the New Orleans-based Daily City Item and Times-Democrat. It was his work as a
reporter that earned Hearn literary attention both for his vivid writing as well as for
his attraction to the underbelly of urban life, particularly in New Orleans. In
addition, while in New Orleans, Heam began to publish translations6 as well as
reworkings of local folklore.
In 1887, after growing weary of modem life and the rampant industrializing
of American society, Heam escaped to Martinique Island in the French West
Indies,7 where he stayed for two years. Obsessed with “Old Worlds” and “exotic
cultures,” Hearn had become interested in Japan after seeing an exhibition on the
6 Heam was also significant for introducing important works o f French Literature to the
English-speaking public. His first translation o f some o f Theophile G autier’s stories was
first published in 1882 and appeared as One of Cleopatra’ s Nights (New York:
Worthington).
7 H eam ’s impressions and experiences while living on M aqrtinique later became the
subject of his novel, Chita: A Memory o f Last Island (New York: H arper & Brothers,
1889).
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10
country at the New Orleans World Exposition (1884-1885). As a result, Heam
decided to travel to Japan after Martinique.
In 1890, Heam arrived in Yokohama, Japan and began the body of writings
for which he is most recognized today. Within a year, Hearn’s articles on Japan -
many of which would be collected in his later books - began to be published in
leading U.S. publications, including Harpers Monthly. After a stint as a journalist
in Kobe, Heam was invited to lecture at Tokyo Imperial University in 1896, where
Q
he remained until his death.
In addition, shortly before his academic appointment, Heam had become a
Japanese citizen, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo and being included in his wife,
Setsu’s, family registry. Heam had met Setsu in 1891 while he was living in
Matsue, a coastal town along the East Asian Sea. The two grew close and
eventually were married. In addition to helping Hearn’s writing career in Japan,
Setsu9 later gave birth to four of his children. By the time of his death, Hearn had
published over ten books on Japan and was widely recognized as an authority on
the nation, as “Japan’s Interpreter” for the West.
Yone Noguchi was bom Noguchi Yonejiro in 1874 in the town of
Tsushima, near Nagoya city, the son o f a modestly successful merchant family who
had strong ties to the Buddhist priesthood. When Noguchi grew older, he
8 Interestingly, the famous Japanese novelist, Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), would take
H earn’s position at Tokyo Imperial University after H earn’s death.
9 Setsu’s importance in H eam ’s literary production while in Japan cannot be overlooked.
Being the H eam was never able to become fluent in Japanese, he relied largely on Setsu to
provide him with material for his books.
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matriculated at Keio Gijuku Daigaku (Keio University), where he eventually met
Yukichi Fukuzawa, the university’s founder and a strong proponent of Western
education and travel for young Japanese. Noguchi became one of the many students
that Fukazawa convinced to go abroad. He left Japan for the United States when he
was 18-years-old in 1893.
After spending two years working at a Japanese immigrant newspaper, the
Soko Shimbun (San Francisco News) and as a house-boy in San Francisco,
Noguchi, determined to become a poet, called upon the famous California recluse-
poet Joquin Miller. Miller, whom Noguchi likened to the famous Japanese writer
Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216)1 0 , agreed to mentor Noguchi at his home in the
Oakland hills. And under Miller’s tutelage, Noguchi began publishing poems in a
local literary magazine, The Lark, a year later. In 1897, Noguchi published his first
books of poetry, Seen & Unseen: Or, Monologues o f a Homeless Snail and The
Voice o f the Valley1 1
In 1900, Noguchi traveled east and spent time in New York, where he
assorted with numerous literati and met Leonie Gilmore (1874-1933), who became
i ■j
Noguchi’s literary assistant and much-needed editor. In addition, Gilmore and
1 0 Kamo no Chomei was the author o f An Account o f M y Hut (Hojoki), one o f the most
famous literary works in Japanese history.
1 1 Seen & Unseen: Or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail (San Francisco: G. Burgess & P.
Garnett, 1897). The Voice of the Valley, Intro. Charles W arren Stoddard (San Francisco:
W. Doxey, 1897).
1 2 It is known that Noguchi greatly struggled with the English language even after he began
publishing. M asayo Duus notes that Gilmore spent much o f her time editing, and in some
cases rewriting, much o f N oguchi’s work. See pp. 24-25, in particular. As such, there
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Noguchi became romatically involved; she would later become Noguchi’s
“common law wife” and the mother of his child, Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), who
went on to become one o f the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century. From their
efforts, Noguchi’s first work of fiction, The American Diary o f the Japanese Girl,
1 ^
was written and published in 1902. After spending the next year in England,
Noguchi spent his final year abroad in New York.
Noguchi returned to Japan after eleven years abroad in 1904 and accepted a
position as English Lecturer at Keio Gijuku, where he remained for the rest of his
life. In addition to teaching, Noguchi also continued writing, publishing numerous
books in English (and later Japanese) of poetry, criticism, and translations.1 4 In
1906, Leonie Gilmore, gave birth to Isamu and came to Japan one year later,
attempting to spare her son the anti-Japanese sentiment that was growing in the
United States. Yet Glimore’s attempt at reuniting with Noguchi was unsuccessful;
he was already involved with another woman and wanted nothing to do with
Gilmore and their biracial son. The relationship between father and son remained
strained and distant throughout their lives, and in particular before and during the
Pacific War.
seems to be an interesting parallel between N oguchi’s literary production and H earn’s
being that both relied heavily on their female partners.
1 3 "Miss M orning Glory" (Yone N oguchi) The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (New
York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1902).
1 4 Some of N oguchi’s best-known works o f criticism include: Through the Torii (London:
E. Mathews, 1914) and The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (London: J. M urray, 1914).
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During World War II, Noguchi severed all his ties to his American and
British friends and became a staunch supporter of Japanese imperialism, publishing
numerous pro-war poems as a contribution to the war effort, a fact that he later
regretted. Nonetheless, as a result, Noguchi was vilified by Japanese intellectuals in
the post-war era, and was charged with “war responsibility” in Shin Nihon
Bungaku, a magazine founded to promote a “democratic” and “progressive”
literature1 5 .
Noguchi died in 1952. He is best remembered today as one of the first
Japanese to write and publish poetry in English and as an arbiter of East-West
literary relations through his books of criticism and his influences on the literary
experimentations of Western canonical writers like W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound.
One Interpretation
On the surface, it may seem that my choice of topic is an unbalanced one;
of the two, Hearn by far outweighs Noguchi in terms of literary reputation and
scholarly attention. Nonetheless, there are numerous connections between the two
men - both in terms of their biographies as well as their literary production - that
warrants such an approach. Biographically speaking, although the two men never
1 5 Being that the focus o f this thesis is N oguchi’s writings about his days in America, I
will, regretfully, not be able to explore his highly problematic writings in support o f
Japanese Imperialism and war with the United States during W orld W ar II. I consider them
inseparable to a fuller understanding o f Noguchi and hope to examine these works in a
future, larger work. For information in English on N oguchi’s role in the rise o f Japanese
nationalism and “war-time responsibility,” see, for instance, Isamu N oguchi’s comments in
Selected English Writings ofYone Noguchi: Poetry. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (London:
Associated University Press, 1990), 42.
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met, Noguchi was very much aware of Heam. Upon Noguchi’s return to Japan, he
actually went to meet Hearn only to arrive days after Heam’s death in 1904. This,
however, began a relationship between the Noguchi and Koizumi families that lead
to the publishing of Noguchi’s book, Lafcadio Hearn in Japan in 1910 in honor of
the late-writer. Later, after Noguchi and Kozumi Setsu became distant as a result of
Noguchi’s cruel treatment of Gilmore and their son, Isamu, Koizumi and Gilmore
became close; during their long friendship, Glimore served as a tutor for Koizumi’s
eldest son, Kazuo, and Isamu found friends in the four young Koizumi children.
In terms of Hearn and Noguchi’s literature, there seems to have been a
perceived interconnectedness as well. Noguchi’s work, in particular, seems to have
been read in Heam’s shadow by those who followed their careers. This passage on
Noguchi, written by Horace Traubel in 1911 for the Philadelphia
Conservator1 6 serves as excellent example:
Noguchi is a child of two civilizations. Heam got tired of America. He
idealized Japan. Japan was his new world. He went there. He married a
Japanese woman. He had children. But as time passed the illusion which
drew him to Japan failed. Then he turned his eyes to America again. He
never came back. But he wished to...He died looking across the sea. Did
Noguchi come to America with the same instinct which drew Heam to
Japan? Did he go back disillusioned? But, whatever may have been the
interior result, the outward effect of Heam’s residence in Japan is seen in
the wonder books he left behind him. He became a mediator. He stood
between. He connected East and West. Noguchi is doing the same thing. He
was here too long to ever get us out of himself again. He can never recede
into his nativity. When he writes he sounds both sides of the globe. He
everywhere shows the contending, and often harmonizing, influences.
Noguchi, like Hearn, reaches both ways.
1 6 This article is included in back pages o f the original publication o f N oguchi’s book o f
poetry, The Pilgrimage (Yokahama: K elly & W alsh, 1909).
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As this passage shows, both Hearn and Noguchi were seen as partaking in a similar
project: bridging the perceived divide of East and West for their respective
countries; also, the author rather astutely points out that as a result of their travels
and negotiations, both men came to inhabit a similar positionality, caught
somewhere in between the binaries of Japan and America (a fact that I will explore
in the conclusion of this thesis). Thus, I believe that my intention to place Heam
and Noguchi “into conversation” has multiple justifications. Not only will their
works reveal much in regards to the worlds about which and for which Heam and
Noguchi wrote, America and Japan, but their literary connection in terms of subject
and audience also requires this approach.
Finally, not only have scholars generally overlooked the important
connection between the Heam and Noguchi, but by reading them along side one
another, I hope to explore new ways in which we can understand these writers as
individuals as well as in relations to their times. As I will show, scholarly reception
of both writers has generally ignored how both men responded to the material
circumstances and political currents of their day in both their art and life. They
have ignored, in other words, the “Worldliness” of these writers, meaning how both
they and their works are irrevocably part and parcel of the world around them, or as
Said has noted, “enmeshed in circumstances, time, place, and society...” (The
World, the Text, and the Critic 35). This will be the focus of my readings of some
of Heam and Noguchi’s most important writings in regards to the transpacific
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16
divide. That is, through an attention to the “worldliness” of their texts, I intend to
explore the dynamic, heterogeneous, and often times ambivalent interplay between
their work and the materiality of the world around them. Drawing widely from the
disciplines of Asian, Asian American and Post-Colonial Studies, I will examine
how these writers negotiated with the material conditions and political concerns
that were central to early Japanese-American relations - namely the power-laden
sites of nation, culture, race, and language.
In Chapter 1 ,1 will analyze the writings of Heam, in particular, his
“ethnographic sketches” of the Japanese in works such as Glimpses o f Unfamiliar
Japan and Kokoro in relation to certain aspects of Orientalist discourse. Through
my reading, I will show how Heam, on one hand, seems to have accepted and
reinforces certain racist, Orientalist views of the Japanese, in particular,
assumptions of essential difference between the racialized poles o f East and West;
yet on the other hand, in other writings, Heam seems to resist these professed views
and displays a great sense of anxiety towards his positionality as a Western within
the East-West binary. As a result, he performs varying discursive strategies
possibility intended to bridge this perceived gulf between East and West, the other
and the self. This ambivalence that I detect in Hearn’s work is a aspect of his
writings largely ignored by scholars, and is a key, as I will show in the conclusion,
to a fuller understanding of Heam and his unique dealings with Japan.
In Charpter 2, my focus will turn to Noguchi. I will perform readings of
many of his important English writings, in particular those that negotiate with the
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17
material circumstances in American society and racism against the Japanese, such
as his “autobiographical” work, The Story ofYone Noguchi, as Told by Himself and
The American Diary o f a Japanese Girl. Scholars of Noguchi, all too often
focusing on his aesthetic accomplishments and resultant influences on Western
perceptions of Japanese cultures, have generally elided the process by which he
gained his prominence, that is how he negotiated his identity in an American
society that structurally denied Japanese any sense of equality. As I will show, as a
result of his often times ambivalent relationship to the English language and
precarious positionality within America’s racial hierarchy, his writings - which are
largely nationalistic in thrust - were compromised by the need to pander to tastes
for Orientalia just as he attempted to defy such discourses. In other words,
Noguchi’s English oeuvre displays multiple and sometimes conflicting strategies of
“resistance” and “accommodation,” in Nguyen’s sense (34), and therefore can
reveal much about the origins of Japanese America, Asian American literature, as
well as U.S.-Japan relations. Finally, I will conclude this thesis by exploring new
ways in which we might situate and understand Noguchi and Heam in the future; I
will argue that by reflecting on the many ways in which both men can be seen as
hybrid figures, caught in a space between the poles of East and West, we can begin
to more fully understand their historical importance as literary figures and early
negotiators of Japanese-American ties across the Pacific.
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18
Chapter I
Re-interpreting “The Interpreter”
Of all the Westerners who traveled to and wrote about Japan, none has
commanded as much scholarly and popular attention as Lafcadio Heam. Not only
did he solidify his literary fame through his voluminous writings on the nation, its
culture and people, but as a result, came to be known (and still is, according to
some) as “Japan’s Interpreter.” As I will show in this section of my thesis, this
reputation that Heam enjoyed - as “Japan’s Interpreter” - is not only in need of
rethinking, but such a move can allow us to better understand the complex and,
often times, ambiguous interplay between Heam’s writings and the larger political
currents; focusing on how Heam dealt with the material conditions of his time in
his writing can serve as a fascinating and important site where we can begin to
better understand his importance as well as many of the central concerns in regards
to Japanese-American history, in particular the expansionist impulses and
subsequent anxieties that America was grappling with around the turn of the
twentieth century.
A vast library of scholarly and popular writings about Heam has grown in
the last century. Despite the varying times and circumstances in which Hearn has
been of interest for both scholarly and popular circles, a survey of these works
shows two general strands of critical attention - particularly among the works in
English - that have remained surprisingly consistent throughout the past one
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19
hundred years. On the one hand, scholars have shown a commitment to
understanding Heam as a literary figure of the turn of the century, focusing on
Hearn as an individual and as one of the most romantic and enigmatic men of his
generation. Thus, scholarly tendency - from Hearn’s lifetime even until this day -
has been to produce literary biography, examining his life experiences, his
background, his childhood, as well as his personality, emotional life, and
i n
intellectual influences. While these efforts are certainly interesting and have
18
contributed much to the knowledge on Heam, their authors have too often
approached his writings as transparent windows into Heam’s life, rather than as
literary works in their own right1 9 . In addition, scholars o f this school have
1 7 See, for instance, George M. Gould’s Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (Philadelphia: George
W. Jacobs and Company, 1908), Jean Tem ple’s Blue Ghost: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn
(New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, Inc., 1931), and Elizabeth Stevenson’s,
Lafcadio Hearn. (New York: The M acmillan Company, 1961). Although these works were
published years apart, all three evince the same concern for H eam ’s personality and life
experiences as seen through his writings and letters. M ore recent biographical works
include Paul M urray’s A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature o f Lafcadio Hearn
(Kent: Japan Library, 1993) and Jonathan C ott’s Wandering Ghost. The Odyssey of
Lafcadio Hearn. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1991). Also see Robert A.
Rosenstone’s fascinating book, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji
Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988) w hich explores three o f the most
famous early Am erican interactions with Japan: Lafcadio Heam , the m issionary William
Elliot Griffis (1843-1928) and the scientist Edward Sylvester M orse (1838-1925)
1 8 In addition, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in other much-deserved
aspects in H eam ’s life, namely, his wife, Koizumi Setsu. See Yoji H asegaw a’s A Walk in
Kumamoto: The Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi Lafcadio Hearn’ s Japanese Wife (Global
Books Ltd. 1997). Hasegaw a’s book contains a new translation o f Koizumi Setsu’s
memoir, Reminiscences, long an important source on H eam ’s life. Also, see, “Heam and
Nishida” by M ichiko Y usa in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996): 309-
316, for information on one o f Hearn’s most important friends in Japan, N ishida Kitaro, as
well as the efforts which led to some o f the earliest books on H eam in Japanese.
1 9 Yu identifies as much in his 1964 study o f H eam ’s philosophy as seen through his
writings, An Ape o f Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn (Michigan: Wayne
State University Press). See his Preface, especially p. x. To date, Y u’s w ork remains an
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considered what influence Japan had on Heam’s life and how the country served as
an ideal context from which he could explore and possibly realize his literary
potential and aesthetic and philosophical visions; yet, with their emphasis on
Heam’s persona and psychology, they have all too often failed to locate him within
the context of his times and examine how he was shaped by, responded to, or even
contributed to the material conditions and political developments around him,
particularly the often times unequal relationship between the West and Japan.
On the other hand, scholars have not yet found an adequate approach to
Heam’s positionality as “Interpreter.” Some, like Allen, have continually
emphasized Heam’s place as “the most gifted and interesting writer on Japan
during its emergence into the modem world” (1). In effect, this has left his literary
status - as the “Interpreter of Japan” - relatively unchanged since his lifetime; even
in the past decade and a half, which has played host to a renewed interest in
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Heam’s life and writings, this remains true . In short, in order to entertain this
view, scholars have had to look past the aspects of Hearn’s oeuvre that are truly
problematic as well as forgo any consideration of the power-laden act of
important and rare study o f H eam ’s literary production and philosophical exploration.
Nonetheless, although Y u’s work does well in tracing the developm ent o f H eam ’s thought
throughout the different phases o f his career and in the m any genres he experimented with,
Yu fails to adequately consider the context in which Hearn wrote and the geopolitical
currents that are being navigated in H eam ’s writing, in particular, the sometimes
problematic and certainly power-laden relationship between certain W estern nations and
Japan.
20See, for instance, Lafcadio Hearn: Japan’ s Great Interpreter Ed. Louis Allen and Jean
Wilson (Japan Library Ltd. 1992) and Lafcadio Hearn Writings From Japan. Ed. Francis
King. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1984). In the introduction to these two works,
both Allen and King reaffirm H eam ’s position as “Interpreter,” making no reference to the
more problematic aspects o f his writings on Japan.
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21
“interpreting” a given people amidst the discourses of Orientalism, practices of
colonialism, and considerations of Americanist expansion that were very much
alive at the turn of the twentieth century.
At the same time, those who have attempted to problematize his
positionality and writings have tended to treat his production as a homogenous,
totalizing Orientalist discourse. Yuzo Ota’s critique of Heam in his essay,
“Lafcadio Heam: Japan’s Problematic Interpreter” in the 1997 book, Rediscovering
Lafcadio Hearn: Japanese Legends, Life and Culture, is an excellent example of
this:
Far from ‘bridging the gulf which separates East from West,’ Heam seems
to have done his best to convince his reader that the gulf was, in fact,
insurmountable. In that way, he seems to have impeded the mutual
understanding between Japan and the rest of the World.
(222)
Ota thus concludes:
Heam’s interpretation fits into preconceived ideas on the part o f many
Western readers as reflected in the phrases, such as ‘inscrutable Orientals’
and ‘the mysterious East’ and thus was and is easily digestible. It also fits
into the deep-rooted assumption on the part of many Japanese readers that
Japanese culture is so unique that only the Japanese can understand it
properly. His writing flatter their desire to be thought to be unique and
different from the world.
(222)
Although I agree with much of Ota’s assessment of certain aspects of Hearn’s
writing as well as its reception, again his remarks address only part of Hearn’s
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22
2 1
oeuvre. What interests me about Hearn’s writing, and what I will explore in detail
in this section of my thesis, is that while he did seem to subscribe to and reinforce
certain racist, Orientalist assumptions about the essential gulf between Japanese
and Westerners in certain writings, in other works, he shows an equally vast sense
of anxiety about this perceived divide. That is, while Hearn may have “believed”
that there can be no parity between East and West, a close examination of other
aspects of his writings will show that he nonetheless, perhaps unconsciously, not
only resisted this view but was also negotiating alternative conceptions of identity
and experience beyond these often times crippling and oppressive binaries. This
ambivalence that Hearn displays is a subject too long ignored by scholars. I believe
that it will provide new insights into his writing and importance as a literary figure,
as I will now show.
Hearn as “The Interpreter”
If there is any doubt Hearn came to inhabit this position as “Japan’s
Interpreter,” and that it is, indeed, a problematic positionality, the editor’s remarks
included in the original edition of one of Hearn’s most well known works, Kwaidan
77
(Ghost Tales) , should put those doubts to rest.
2 1 See Sumiko H igashi’s essay, “Touring the Orient W ith Lafcadio Heam and Cecil B.
Demille,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. Ed. Daniel
Bem ardi (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 329-353 for another take
on H eam ’s Orientalism.
2 2 Kwaidan was originally published in 1904 by Houghton, M ifflin and Company. The
edition that I cite from was re-printed in 1971 by Charles E. Turtle Co,. Inc.
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23
In the introduction, the author , interestingly, chooses to virtually ignore
the actual content of Hearn’s book. Kwaidan is, after all, a collection of ghost
stories, uncanny folklore as well as reflections on the supernatural’s role in
Japanese life. Rather, the editor argues for the significance of Hearn’s work by
situating it within the context of the geopolitical shifts taking place in the early
twentieth century, namely the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905). In his mind, it is a
“delicate irony” that the publication of Hearn’s “exquisite studies of
Japan...happens to fall on the very month when the world is waiting with tense
expectation for the news of the latest exploits of the Japanese battleships” (xi). The
significance of the war’s outcome, the author continues, holds implications not just
for Russia, but for the entire Western world:
Whatever the outcome of the present struggle...it is significant that a nation
of the East, equipped with Western weapons and girdling itself with
Western energy of will, is deliberately measuring strength against one of the
great powers of the Occident.
(.Kwaidan xi)
Considering the editor’s own implied positionality - as a “Westerner” - by clearly
aligning Russia with “the Occident,” the author has placed the nation in the role of
surrogate for other European countries. In this position, Russia serves as a test-case
against a Japan “measuring its strength” on the world stage. As a result, the stakes
in the war become not just Russia’s alone; they are an indicator o f a potential threat
2 3 The editor’s comments in the original edition were published anonymously. Therefore,
in my reading, I will refer to the w riter as the editor or the “author.”
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24
to other nations as well. Therein, the author implies, lies Western readers’ interest
in better “understanding” the Japanese.
Also relevant is the editor’s attitude towards what he calls “purely political
and statistical studies” and the resultant privileging of works such as Hearn’s. He
says:
No one is wise enough to forecast the results of such a conflict upon the
civilization of the world. The best one can do is to estimate, as intelligently
as possible, the national characteristics of the peoples engaged, basing one’s
hopes and fears upon the psychology of the two races rather than upon
purely political and statistical studies of the complicated questions involved
in the present war.
(Kwaidan xi-xii)
The author downplays the reliability of political or empirical inquiries in favor of
ethnographic studies; thus, it is knowledge of the cultural and psychological “traits”
of the Japanese and Russians, not raw political data, that will provide
understanding in regards to the outcome and implications of the war. Hearn, he
believes is the one who can fulfill this task:
There is scarcely an aspect of contemporary Japanese life, scarcely an
element in the social, political, and military questions involved in the
present conflict with Russia which is not made clear in one or another of the
books with which he [Hearn] has charmed American readers.
(Kwaidan xii)
Through this, the editor affirms the link between cultural production - in this case,
Hearn’s writing - and the larger political landscape, the very one that I am
attempting to explore here.
But there is one more issue that the editor raises that speaks to Hearn’s
positionality as “Interpreter.” After discussing the war between Russia and Japan
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25
and how best his readers may understand its outcome and ramifications, he claims
that there is another reason why a writer like Heam is necessary: in short, the
Japanese, in contrast with the Russians, are unable to produce a writer who could
represent their nation to his standards. The editor writes:
The Russian people have had literary spokesmen who for more than a
generation have fascinated the European audience. The Japanese, on the
other hand, have possessed no such national and universally recognized
figures as Turgenieff [sic] or Tolstoy. They need an interpreter.
{Kwaidan xii)
This belief that the Japanese “need an interpreter” due to their lack of a “nationally
or universally recognized figure” is troubling for numerous reasons. On the one
hand, the author demonstrates his complete ignorance of Japanese intellectual or
cultural production, from either the pre-modem or modem periods, through his
assertion that the Japanese lack a nationally recognized literary figure. Even more
revealing however, is the statement that Japan has no “universally” recognized
writer on par with the Russians. Considering the Eurocentric notion of
“universality” in acceptance at the time (and to some degree, still today)24, and in
light of the discourse of Orientalism, it is my contention that it would be impossible
for a Japanese writer to be granted such a position. That is, being that Russia had
already been explicitly aligned with the “West,” Russian writers and artists could
more easily be included in the cannon o f “great writers.” A Japanese, on the other
hand, who was then assumed to be a member of a different race, culture, and
2 4 For an interesting discussion on the problematic notion o f “universality” see Dorine
Kondo’s About Face: Performing Race in Theater and Fashion (New York:
Routledge, 1997), in particular pp. 19-20.
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26
civilization to those of European ancestry, would never be granted inclusion under
the umbrella of “universality.” Thus, according to this logic, only a writer like
Hearn - a Westerner who crossed over the gulf between East and West and
returned with interpretations that made the Oriental other intelligible through a
“Western framework” - is qualified to serve as “Interpreter” in a time such as the
early twentieth century. How Hearn attempts to fulfill this role will be essential to
understanding and situating his work.
Thus far, I have explored how Hearn was viewed (or encouraged to, at
least) by his reading public in the West; there are certainly problematic elements
attached to the position of “Interpreter” that he seems to have inhabited. His
writings, as well, have certain currents that deserve greater critical attention - in
particular in what might be called his ethnographic sketches on the Japanese and
their material life. Some of his first impressions of Japan, as recorded in his first
published book on the country, Glimpses ofUnfamilar Japan, serve as a case in
point.2 5
In the essay, “My First Day in the Orient,” Hearn recounts his first day in
Japan. Engaging a rickshaw driver for the day, Hearn travels throughout the city
and visits temples and marketplaces;2 6 in his essay, he records and reflects upon all
he sees. Throughout the work, Hearn consistently relates his personal impressions
of what he encounters through a third person “traveler,” as well as to a second
2 5 Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan was first published in 1894. The version that I will cite is
the 1976 reprint by the Charles E. Turtle Company, Inc. from Tokyo.
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27
person “you.” This usage seeks to directly draw his readers into the scene at hand;
that is, although it is through Hearn’s eyes that the world that Hearn encounters is
rendered, the pronounal devices give the effect that it is the reader who is taking the
journey as well.
Right away, what has now become all too familiar Orientalist tropes appear
throughout the work. Practically every thing the narrator sees is “elfish,” “dainty”
and “quaint.” Moreover, Hearn’s initial desire for these things is striking. He has
this to say about the intoxicating visions surrounding him during a visit to a
marketplace:
The shopkeeper never asks you to buy; but his wares are enchanted, and if
you once begin buying you are lost. Cheapness means only a temptation to
commit bankruptcy; for the resources for irresistible artistic cheapness are
inexhaustible. The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain
what you wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the
fact to your self, what you really want to buy is not the contents of a shop;
you want the shop and the shopkeeper, and the streets of the ships with their
draperies and their habitants, the whole city and the bay and the mountains
begirdling it, and Fujiyama’s white witchery over hanging it in the
speckless sky, all Japan, in very truth, with its magical trees and luminous
atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and forty millions of
the most lovable people in the universe.
(Glimpses 8-9).
Could this passage stem from the enthusiasm of a traveler witnessing something
new for the first time? Possibly. Nevertheless, I find the proprietary, even
imperialist overtones of his reaction disturbing. That is, for Hearn, at this point in
his encounter with Japan, not only are the consumer products that Japan has to offer
desirable, and accessible due their “cheapness,” but the want of one thing only
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leads to another; soon Hearn’s reaction smacks of an endless colonial avarice
whose apogee is the desire for all of Japan itself.
Within this mix, Hearn also recognizes the signs of Meiji modernization all
around him in the “mingling” of what he considers to be “the old,” or things
Japanese, and the “new,” or things Western: he sees tea-houses with electric bells,
shops of American sewing machines next to stores selling Buddhist images,
photography studios next to sandal makers, and so on. Yet, surprisingly, these
juxtapositions of “East” and “West” “present no incongruities” for Heam
{Glimpses 8). Rather, there is a naturalness about the scene, being that “each
sample of Occidental innovation is set into an Oriental frame that seems adaptable
to any picture” {Glimpses 8). The adaptability of Japanese life that Heam
emphasizes deserves greater attention, in particular, how such a statement could be
perceived by his reading public. If we recall Palimbo-Liu’s analysis, the turn of the
twentieth century marked a period when American society was testing the
expansionist waters into the Pacific; yet this desire to go West was constantly
threatened by the task of incorporating countries and people whose difference
would threaten the integrity of the “American way of life.” Whether intentional on
Hearn’s part or not, by presenting a Japan as a country that is adaptable to “Western
things and ways,” Hearn’s writing could be suggesting that an American imperialist
project in Japan was in fact possible, that “American-ness” could accommodate
“Japan-ness” considering the later country’s material malleability.
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Hearn, Orientalism, and “Heterogeneity”
Based on what I have said thus far on both Hearn’s writings as well as his
reception during his lifetime, it would seem as though he fits neatly within the
tradition of Orientalism, or as Edward Said defines it, the discursive process by
thi
which European culture has, from the 18 century on, attempted to “manage - and
even produce - the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically,
scientifically, and imaginatively” (Orientalism 3). Through my readings of some of
Hearn’s writings, in particular his ethnographic essays, I will show that this is
indeed the case, at least to some extent. That is to say, he was certainly influenced
by some of the problematic assumptions of his time and in many ways helped to
reinforce them. But scholars who addressed the subject of Orientalism after Said’s
seminal 1978 text showed that the discourse is a far more complex phenomenon
than simply the process by which the hegemonic Occident constructed an
essentialized Oriental other for the purpose of understanding and possibly
controlling its people. That is, the “Orient” itself has not only meant different
things across history, but a given Orientalist discourse, in many instances, suffers
from internal fractures and instabilities as a result o f the numerous concerns vying
within a given text or a particular body of work (Lowe 7-8). These inconsistencies
can not only disrupt the integrity and efficacy of the Orientalist discourse but are
often times the source for instances of resistance against the very hegemonies their
work had, either implicitly or explicitly, seemed to support. As I will show, this is
also the case with Hearn’s oeuvre. Lisa Lowe’s work, in particular her notion of
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30
“heterogeneity,” gives us the necessary vocabulary to understand the work of Heam
and even Noguchi.
In her book Critical Terrains, Lowe writes that within the literature about
the “Orient” there is always the possibility “that social events and circumstances
other than the relationship between Europe and the non-European world are
implicated in the literature about the Orient, and that the relative importance of
these other conditions differs over time and by culture” (7-8) There are, in other
words, numerous concerns and relationships of power being negotiated within a
given Orientalist discourse: including concerns of race, class, gender, sexuality,
colonization, capitalization, modernization, among others, that shift in focus and
importance over time and place. By inserting “heterogeneity” into the Orientalist
discourse, Lowe opens up the possibility for multiple readings, of detecting
ambivalence and multivalence within an individual text, an author’s body of work,
and even in regards to how we understand a particular literary figure. The scholar
writes:
Orientalism facilitates the inscription of many different kinds of differences
as oriental otherness, and the use of oriental figures at one moment may be
distinct from their use in another historical period, in another set of texts, or
even at another moment in the same body of work.
(Lowe 8)
Although Lowe is addressing the subject of British and French Orientalisms in her
book, nonetheless, I feel her insights are apt for my present study of America’s
relationship to Japan, particularly in regards to the ambiguity that Heam displays in
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his body of writing towards the perceived gulf between East and West, as I will
now show.
Hearn’s Kokoro
Although, according to Heam, certain elements of Japanese life - in
particular its materiality - may be adaptable to Western ways, and although
certainly Japan’s resources and consumer products were alluring, other aspects of
the country remained alien and impenetrable. In many o f Heam’s works -
especially one’s in which he deals with issues of Japanese psychology, emotion and
religious beliefs - the perceived disparity between Japan and the West is something
that he posits time and time again. And yet, as my reading of several chapters from
77
one of his most well-known works, Kokoro (as well a brief references to his,
Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation) will show, at other times, he displays a great
deal of anxiety about this East-West divide and seems to search for alternatives to
it.
In his essay, “The Genius of Japanese Civilization,” Heam explores what he
calls the “Race-Ghost” of Japan, something that he believes to be the “strength of
its civilization” {Kokoro 13). In order to do so, however, Heam consistently
employs a comparative dynamic that serves to reinforce the distance between East
and West - that is ,the perceived “contrast between the emotional and intellectual
worlds of West and East!” {Kokoro 11). Throughout the work, Heam asserts that
2 7 Kokoro was originally published in 1895. The version that I cite is the 2001 reprint by
ICG Muse, Inc. in Tokyo, Japan.
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there can be no parity, no common ground or mutual understanding between East
or West. For instance, he writes:
One may imagine that he sympathizes with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the
sympathy can never be real to more than a small extent outside of the
simplest phrases of common emotional life, - those phases in which a child
or man are at one. The more complex feelings of the Oriental have been
composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and individual, which
have had no really precise correspondence of experience in Western life,
and which we can therefore not fully know. For converse reasons, the
Japanese cannot, even though they would, give Europeans their best
sympathy.
{Kokoro 10)
Through passages like this, Heam re-circulates the assumption of essential
difference and a concomitant tension between racialized people due to their
inability to “sympathize” with one another. Thus, knowledge of the other can only
have the comparative benefits of solidifying one’s sense of self. He writes:
But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to discern the true
color of Japanese life, either intellectual or emotional (since the one is
woven into the other), it is equally impossible for him to escape the
conviction that, compared to his own, it is very small. It is dainty; it holds
delicate potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is otherwise so
small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost supernatural.
{Kokoro 10)
In this case, the aspect of Orientalist discourse that Heam seems to support seeks as
much an understanding of the white Western self through the creation of an alien
other as any hope to genuinely understand that other. In this sense, ultimately, the
other, or the abjected, must be created and positioned as diametrically opposed to
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33
the self in order for the self to constitute itself. This is particularly true in regards to
9 8
America’s relationship with Asians, historically speaking.
But Heam dealt not just with the inner life of his subject, he also addressed
the emergence of Japan as a “modern nation,” and in particular, as a military
power. His work, therefore, must be understood as also having negotiated with the
real-life political environment around him. Note, for instance, his remarks in,
“After the War,” an essay also in Kokoro. The piece, written in May of 1895,
begins at the end of the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1985). In it, Heam reflects on
what effect the victory has had for Japan in terms of its national image and how this
will affect its international posture in the future. Calling the military revival of the
Meiji period the “real birthday of the New Japan” (Kokoro 77), Heam notes that the
victory over China had the effect of reinforcing a feeling that was there all along.
He writes:
The war is ended; the future, though clouded, seems big with promise; and,
however grim the obstacles to loftier and more enduring achievements,
Japan has neither fears nor doubts...It is not a new feeling created by
victory. It is a race feeling, which repeated triumphs have served only to
strengthen. From the instance o f declaration of war there was never the least
doubt of ultimate victory.
{Kokoro 77-78 My Emphasis)
This diagnosis of a “race feeling” in the Japanese - an inherent racial pride that
they all feel - again serves to reinforce the image of Japan as other for Western
2 8 See Karen Shimakawa’s reworking o f Julia K risteva’s notion o f “A bjection” in regards
to the American body-politic’s relationship to Asians, in National Abjection-. The Asian
American Body on Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
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34
countries. But as this passage shows, he employs the assumption in his treatment of
Japan as a military power as well. The fact that this biological difference is linked
with Japan’s status as a military power makes Hearn’s claims all the more
dangerous (and relevant considering the interest the editor of Kwaidan had in the
conflict between Japan and Russia as a test of “East versus West”). Heam
elaborates on this by noting the connection between Japan’s military and its
cultural/religious life. He closes the essay by recounting a conversation with a
Japanese friend who appears in numerous works, Manyemon, while watching the
sight of returned Japanese troops in the street. The exchange is worth quoting at
length:
I said to Manyemon: “This evening they will be in Osaka and Nagoya. They
will hear the bugles calling; and they will think of comrades who never can
return.” The old man answered, with simple earnestness: “Perhaps by
Western people it is thought that the dead never return. But we cannot so
think. There are no Japanese dead who do not return. There are none who
do not know the way. From China and from Chosen [Korea], and out of the
bitter sea, all our dead have come back - all\ They are with us now. In
every dusk they gather to hear the bugles that called them home. And they
will hear them also in that day when the armies of the Son of Heaven shall
be summoned against Russia.”
(Kokoro 92-93 Italics in the Original)
Heam romanticizes - and to a degree, even celebrates - the relationship between
Japan’s religious practices, particularly its ancestor worship, and its military
endeavors with this passage. According to his view, Japan’s dead, particularly
those who died in war, will as spirits forever fight along side their brethren; they
too will engage Japan’s future enemy, presumably Russia. This interpretation of
Japan’s emerging military might is problematic for numerous reasons. Dawson has
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noted that never did Hearn fully appreciate the connection between Japan’s build
up of industrial and war-waging abilities and its nascent imperial ambitions (24).
He died before having to witness and account for the phenomenon in all of its
brutality. But in his time and considering Hearn’s audience, his inflated vision of
Japan’s spiritual and military might may have contributed to the perception of
Japan not just as ’’other” but as “enemy other.” That is, it supports the position that
interaction with Japanese is not only dangerous for its threat to the cultural and
social fabric o f America, but also because Japan may some day be an actual and
formidable foe in war as well.
As I have shown thus far, Hearns writings on Japan’s material life are
characterized by at least two strains of Orientalist and even imperialist thought: on
the one hand, he has presented a Japan that is utterly enchanting, worthy of the
attention of American colonial desire; on the other, his writings evince a fear of
what that contact with and possible appropriation of “Japaneseness” might entail.
In other words, he has essentially performed the sentiments and concerns that
Palimbo-Liu identified in turn of the century America, in other words, the
oscillation between desire for expansion into Asia and fear of what that contact
might entail (2).
But we cannot stop there in our understanding of Heam. To do so would be
the functioning of the selective choosing of passages that suit particular and
convenient interpretations rather than attempting to grasp a larger totality of
Heam’s writings in all their complexity and ambivalence (this practice is one of the
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reasons why Heam’s “Orientalism” has never been adequately dealt with in my
view). The irony of these works that I have discussed thus far is that Heam may be
trying to praise the Japanese. Furthermore, his dislike of modernity and
condemnation of Western colonialism and its many facets and products -
missionaries, industrialization, loss of “traditional” culture - are well known as
well.2 9 For instance, in the essay, “Industrial Danger” in Japan: An Attempt at
Interpretation30, he laments Japan’s departing from the “Way of the Gods” at the
hands of industrialization and possible colonization, saying:
And the domestic future appears dark. Bom of that darkness an evil dream
comes oftentimes to those who love Japan: the fear that all her efforts are
being directed...only to prepare the land for the sojourn of peoples older by
centuries in commercial experience...for the use of foreign capital...that her
[military] may be doomed to make her last sacrifices in hopeless contest
against some combination o f greedy states...
{Japan 391)
For this, and for other infractions, Heam predicts that “Western civilization will
have to pay, sooner or later, the full penalty for its deeds of its oppression” {Japan
411). Considering that Hearn has consistently aligned himself with the West in his
writings, the fact that he so harshly condemns Western imperialism and other acts
of aggression is shocking. These facts must be taken into account in our
examination of Heam as well. Yet how can we? They are, after all, seeming
contradictions. As I read Hearn’s work, his writings display a tremendous anxiety
2 9 In addition to the passages that I will analyze, see, for instance, his condemnation of
“missionary” and “W estern aggression” against Japan and China in the essay “Jujitsu” in
Out o f the East (Boston: Houghton, M ifflin and Company, 1895), pp. 202-210.
3 0 The book was originally published in 1904 by M acmillan and Co. Ltd. The version from
which I cite is the 2001 edition published by ICG Muse in Japan.
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towards the essentialized binaries of East and West as well as his own positionality
as a Westerner. In other words, although he seems to accept the terms of
Orientalism in some of his writings, in others, he shows a great ambivalence
towards them and even attempts to subvert them. Even within the work that I have
been primarily discussing thus far, Kokoro, this is true. What I will now explore are
other aspects of his oeuvre where Heam is both consciously and unconsciously
attempting to resist the very forces of Orientalism and Westernization that his
writings thus far seemed to support. Therein, we will see the intervention of
heterogeneity and ambiguity in his work and discover new ways of understanding
him.
A Torn Heart
Given what I have said thus far, the essential differences that were assumed
to exist between Japanese and Euro-Americans - views that Heam seemed to
support in his writings - would dictate that there can be no parity, no “authentic”
negotiation and understanding between the two parties due to the inherent and
disparate workings o f the Occidental and Oriental minds. Yet despite this, Heam, at
other points in his writings, not only seems to grapple with this belief, but attempts
to elaborate strategies with which this perceived gap might be bridged. His work,
“A Street Singer” from Kokoro is one such story where we can see this process
unfolding. The piece tells the story of an encounter between the narrator, Heam,
and a woman, a blind street singer, who performs a ballad that tells of a recent love-
suicide; her singing, Heam writes, moved him to “weep silently” even though he
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could not understand the words. What interests me is Heam’s intellectual and
emotional reaction to the song, that is how he attempts to understand the “secret of
those magical tones” and how he uses his experience to navigate cultural difference
between East and West {Kokoro 36).
For Heam, despite the fact that he, “did not distinguish the words...” he
none the less claims to have understood more than just the meaning of the song. He
says: “I felt the sorrow and the sweet-ness and the patience of the life of Japan pass
with her voice into my heart ...’ ’'{Kokoro 36). In other words, it was the artistry of
the singer that, in a fleeting moment, caused the repository of Japan’s cultural
experience to pass through Heam; furthermore, he later leams after reading the text
that the story itself was rather mundane {Kokoro 38). Thus, Heam concludes, it
could only be the power of her voice and what it awakened in him - a romantic
trope to be sure - that inaugurated a communion by which he could understand her
perspective and their cultural difference could be bridged.
And yet, despite this, Hearn still struggles. He seems to still doubt whether
or not this phenomenon was possible and performs this ambivalence soon after.
That is, although he states that music stems from an almost universalist “primitive
natural utterance of feeling, - of that untaught speech of sorrow, joy, or passion,
whose words are tones,” he follows, strangely, by reaffirming an essential
difference between white and Asian races. That is, he notes that just as languages
between peoples differ, musical language also follows suit; this results from an
incommensurability between the process of signification imbedded in the minds
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and cultural matrixes of Easterners and Westerners. Heam writes: “Wherefore
melodies which move us [Westerners] deeply have no significance to Japanese
ears; and melodies that touch us not at all make powerful appeal to the emotion of a
race whose soul-life differs from our own as blue differs from yellow” {Kokoro
39). Yet after that, in the same passage, he rejects his own statements and the
implications of an essentialized approach to racial and cultural difference; he goes
back, unwilling to accept this divide which would make his profound experience
impossible, wondering:
Still, what is the reason of the deeper feelings evoked in me - an alien - by
this Oriental chant that I could never even leam...surely in the voice of the
singer there were qualities able to make appeal to something larger than the
sum of the experience of one race...to something wide as human life...
{Kokoro 39)
This admittance - that there may be “something larger than the sum of the
experience of one race...something wide as human life” - attempts to undermine
the essentialized gulf between the different worlds that were thought to lie on both
sides of the Pacific; it is only through art that we can have a brief experience of that
“something.” Yet Heam does not stop there. That is, he does not simply posit that
there may, on a fundamental level, be a same-ness about the identities delineated by
the terms Orient and Occident; rather, as I believe, he may be attempting to
negotiate beyond the identities offered to him by these polarities. He concludes the
passage with a philosophical reflection of this encounter:
Surely there have never been two voices having precisely the same quality.
But in the utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to
the myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar
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to even the newly-born the meaning of the tone of caresses. Inherited, no
doubt, likewise, our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of pity.
And so the chant of the blind woman in this city of the far East may revive
in even a Western mind emotion deeper than an individual being, - vague
dumb pathos of forgotten sorrow, - dim loving remembrances of
generations unremembered. The dead never die utterly. They sleep in the
darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, - to be startled at the rarest
moments only by the echo of some voice that recalls their past.
{Kokoro 40)
On a rhetorical level, Hearn’s remembrance of unremembered generations, his
trope of preexistence, points to an uncanny splitting of the self that reveals the
constructed nature of identity and the arbitrariness of “belonging” to a particular
race or culture. By asserting that all beings share this pre-existence, an inherited
T1
memory - a part Buddhist, part Spencerian view perhaps - Heam may be arguing
for the recognition of something before, or “beyond” this life or world. Part-wish to
be sure, it seems that this attempt may stem from the anxiety on Heam’s part
towards the poles of East and West that the world has presented him. Not only is art
the key to this realization - that is, the power that art possesses - but countless act
of translations - of hearing, recognizing or emitting the echo that recalls this past -
are required to experience, if only for a moment, something beyond the biologically
3 1 In short, H eam was an advocate o f the philosophy o f H ebert Spencer, in particular his
notion o f “force,” which held that the world evolved with an implied purpose and moral
direction w hich was passed down genetically from generation to generation. Heam outlines
his belief o f the com patibility between “Eastern” and “W estern” thought, in particular
between Spencerian and Buddhist philosophy in the essay, “The Idea o f Pre-existence,” in
Kokoro. For scholarly studies that explore the influence o f Spencer’s thought on H eam ’s
life and writings, see Y u’s An Ape of Gods and D aw son’s Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision
of Japan. For an introduction to H eam ’s views on Buddhism, see K enneth Rexroth’s
remarks in the anthology, The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Santa Barbara: Ross-
E riksonlnc., 1977).
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and culturally determined life, something other than who we think we are or who
'X 'J
we are told to be.
But this is not simply a personal or philosophical belief on Heam’s part. He
uses this strategy - o f an artist’s power and responsibility - to address the
perceived decline of “traditional” Japanese culture at the hands of modernization,
industrialization, materialism and perhaps Westernization as well. In the story, “In
the Twilight of the Gods,” also in Kokoro, Heam writes about a day spent talking
with an English curio who collects Buddhist relics to sell to the British Museum.
Entering the room where the curio stores his acquisitions, Heam surveys a room
filled with statues of Buddha’s, Bodhisattvas and other religious iconography from
across Japan, China, Korea and India. The curio, not fully knowing what he has
acquired, relies on Heam throughout to understand the cultural significance of what
seems to be pieces of the entire religious tradition of Asia. What the Englishman is
most interested in, rather, is the commercial value of the relics and the potential
profits they represent; he rejoices in the price of a mere “fifty thousand dollars” that
he paid for them all. To this, Heam reflects:
But the images themselves told me how much more was their cost to
forgotten piety, notwithstanding the cheapness of labor in the East. Also
321 would like to note here that H eam ’s literary production while in Japan was very much a
process of translation. Being that Hearn was never able to adequately leam Japanese and
therefore had to rely o f his wife for information, the very m eans by which he produced the
majority of his work was born from multiple acts o f translation: from written or oral
archives to Koizumi Setsu, from her to Heam in their particular mode o f half-
Japanese/half-English communication, and finally from H eam ’s understanding through the
process of writing.
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they told me of the dead millions whose pilgrims feet had worm hollow the
steps leading to the shrines, of the buried mothers who used to suspend little
baby-dresses before their alters, of the generations of children taught to
murmur prayers to them, of the countless sorrows and hopes confided to
them. Ghosts of the worship of centuries had followed them into exile; a
thin sweet odor of incense haunted the dusty place.
{Kokoro 186)
Although the curio converts the art into monetary terms, Heam translates the
statues into the human experience they represent. He, therefore, processes the toll
of the Englishman’s “steal” in terms of a loss of a tradition and the human labors
and sufferings across the centuries that it took to build it. In doing so, Hearn is
explicitly critiquing the effects of materialization, industrialization and colonial
desire through the curio’s actions.
Yet, as the following exchange shows, Heam’s curio as well, on some level,
understands the price that will be paid for his possession. Viewing a statue of
Kishibojin, the “goddess who loves children,” the curio remarks on its likeness to
images of the Virgin Mary of Christianity. This leads to an exchange where the
Englishman says to Hearn:
“People talk of idolatry,” he went on amusingly. “I’ve seen things like
many of these in Roman Catholic chapels. Seems to me religion is pretty
much the same the world over.”
“I think you are right,” I said.
“Why, the story of the Buddha is like the story of Christ, isn’t it?”
“To some degree,” I assented.
“Only he wasn’t crucified.”
{Kokoro 190-191)
In addition laying a critique against a Western tradition for crucifying its “savior”
while the East cherished its, by noting a fundamental kinship between the different
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faiths of the world, Hearn is contradicting prior statements that I have explored
about the incommensurability of East and West. In doing so, in this passage, I
contend that he is attempting to, either consciously or unconsciously, negotiate not
only this perceived cultural gulf, but also subvert the politics of Modernity by
asserting that the (de)valuation of one cultural or religious tradition may be an
affront to all traditions. In other words, through this passage, Heam may be
critiquing the practices that lead to the loss of traditional culture.
Nonetheless, Heam sees no way of stemming this tide in any material sense.
He can only hope that the statues and symbols of a lost world will someday serve a
noble purpose and that their (de)valuation is not in vain. Reflecting on what may
happen to the pieces once they leave Japan, he writes:
Then I fancied them immured somewhere in that vast necropolis of dead
gods, under the gloom of a pea-soup-fog, chambered with forgotten
divinities of Egypt or Babylon, and trembling faintly at the roar of London,
- all to what end? Perhaps to aid another Alma Tadema3 3 to paint the beauty
of another vanished civilization; perhaps to assist the illustration of an
English Dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire some future laureate
with a metaphor startling as Tennyson’s figure of the “oiled and curled
Assyrian bull.34” Assuredly they would not be preserved in vain. The
thinkers of a less conventional and selfish era would teach new reverence
for them. Each eidolon shaped by human faith remains the shell of a truth
eternally divine; and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The
soft serenity, the passionless tenderness of these Buddha faces might yet
give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds transformed into conventions,
eager for the coming of another teacher...
{Kokoro 192)
3 3 H eam is referencing Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema (1836-1912) a Dutch-bom painter who
moved to England where he established him self as one o f the most highly regarded
painters of his generation. Among his famous works are Pastimes in Ancient Egypt (1864).
3 4 See Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809-1892) “Maud: A M elodrama,” written in 1855.
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In this passage, Heam shows his resignation to what seems to be inevitable realities
of modem life. The pieces will go to the British Museum to become cold relics of
the past. Modernization will continue. And traditions will fade as a result. What
Hearn does hope for is that these works might provide inspiration to those willing
to hear and translate their call into the paintings and poems of tomorrow. To be
sure, for Hearn, it is artists that must complete this task. Only they can understand
the “ghostly power” of lost cultures and revitalize them by “teaching a new
reverence” for these symbols of a disappearing world. With this belief, Heam may
be outlining a possible afterlife for traditions that fall victim to the dominant
political currents in the world, namely, modernization, industrialization and
colonialism.
What I have tried to show in these pages is the great sense of tension and
ambivalence in Heam’s work towards the material circumstances and political
currents of his day. On one hand, Heam is very much a “man of his times” in that
he has been influenced by and helps to reinforce certain problematic currents of
thought and political developments - namely, certain aspects of Orientalist
discourse and the sometimes uneven, power-infused relationship between Japan
and the West. In doing so, his writings reflect the great sense of anxiety that the
West, and particularly the U.S., felt towards Japan as well as Asia as a whole. At
the same time, this anxiety is double-edged. Although Heam is part and parcel of
the world around him, he is also reflecting on his own positionality and in some
ways resisting these power-structures. By honing in on this multi-valence, I have
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attempted to show new ways in which we might understand Heam’s writing both
on its own terms as well as in relation to the times. This process may also help us to
understand Hearn, the figure, as well. After all, he did “become Japanese.” How
can we make sense of this gesture in light of what I have argued above? What could
it mean for Heam - a man who has accepted and re-circulated a conception of race,
culture, and country that held that racialized people were essentially different from
one another - to take a nationality that crossed a seemingly uncrossable racial
divide? Even more, how can we understand other aspects of his writing, especially
the body of work that he is most famous and loved for - his re-workings of Japan’s
myth, folk-lore and ghost tales - in light of his grapplings with the material
conditions of his day. Such questions I will leave until the concluding part of this
thesis. For now, I will turn to the work of Yone Noguchi. As I show, not only will
Heam help us to better situate Noguchi, but the Japanese poet will eventually help
us to understand Heam as well.
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Chapter II
Situating the “Homeless Snail”
If the works of Lafcadio Heam can be seen as a site where many of the
central issues in the United States’ interactions with Japan were contested, then
Yone Noguchi’s writings can serve as an example of how Japan negotiated its
relationship with America. Many writers and intellectuals of Meiji and Taisho
(1912-1926) Japan engaged, in some way, with the West in their lives and writings.
Whether it was through personal travel or just by witnessing the “modernizing” of
the world around them, America and Europe were central to their grapplings not
only of the perceived divide between East and West, but also of tradition and
modernity, the personal and the public as well as many of the political, racialized,
gendered, cultural and artistic concerns that dominated the discourses of their
times.
Nonetheless, Noguchi is unique among them. Not only did he go abroad,
across the Pacific and negotiate his identity against the backdrop of America (and
3 5 The question o f how to write N oguchi’s name encapsulates m any o f the central problems
that we encounter when trying to situate him within a particular literary tradition.
Generally, if we were to consider him a Japanese writer, we would w rite his family name,
Noguchi, first, followed by his given name, Yone (or Yonejiro as he is also known). If we
were to consider him a part o f the American, or English literary cannon, we write his first
name, Yone, first. N either explanations are adequate being that he is both a Japanese
national and one who began his career writing in the English language in America. W ith no
simple solution to this problem, I have chosen to write his name as he chose to present it in
his books, as “Yone N oguchi,” being that his writings are the concern o f this present study.
3 6 Some of the noteworthy writers o f N oguchi’s generation who traveled lived abroad
include: Natsume Soseki, who lived in England, Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), who went to
England and France, Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945), who lived in Canada and America,
M ori Ogai (1862-1922), who lived in Germany, and Nagai Kafu (1879-1959), who lived
and wrote about his experiences in Am erica and France.
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to a lesser degree, England), but he established himself as a writer in English and
went on to influence some of the most significant literary movements of his day.
Thus, his English writings, being that they are the work of a Japanese national yet
are part of a different literary tradition, provide a different and rare opportunity to
examine the negotiations of East and West that were so prevalent in his generation.
At the same time, Noguchi was not alone in his Pacific crossing; he was among the
thousands of Japanese who, from 1885 on, went East to Hawaii and to the West
Coast of the United States, thus having to “reconcile simultaneous national
belongings as citizen-subjects of one state and yet resident-members of
another...(Azuma 6). As such, and as I will show in this chapter, his writings can
also tell us much about the experience of Japanese abroad and the beginnings of
Japanese America and Asian American literature. We must understand that
Noguchi’s “crossings” and negotiations are, therefore, multiple and nuanced - over
nations, cultures, traditions, languages and even scholarly disciplines.
Between Asia and Asian America
The need for such an approach to Noguchi becomes clear with a survey of
the scholarship on the writer. Some scholars, such as Yoshinobu Hakutani and
Edward Marx, have located him in what might be called an East-West literary
paradigm; in other words, they have tended to emphasize his influence on canonical
Western writers, including W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, whose literary experiments
in drama and poetry can be tied to their introduction through Noguchi to Japan’s
literary, dramatic, and aesthetic principles as seen in the Noh theater, Haiku poetry,
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and Zen Philosophy. Exploring their personal correspondence as well as the
overlapping of publication dates for many of Noguchi’s and Pound’s most
important works, Hakutani writes, “one can scarcely overlook the direct link
between Japanese poetics and Pound’s imagism” (83). Hakutani’s argument
suggests that Noguchi had a far greater influence on one of Western Modernism’s
most important thinkers than has been acknowledged. Marx, as well, argues that
more attention must be placed on Noguchi as a “forerunner and influence in the
history of modernist poetry in the early decades of the twentieth century” (“What
About My Songs” 60). As such, he concludes: “it is beyond dispute that Noguchi
was an important figure in the Asian-American literary tradition, the first
significant modernist poet of California, and a crucial figure in East-West literary
interactions” (“What About My Songs” 60). Within this East-West paradigm, these
scholars have focused on Noguchi as an arbiter of literary and aesthetic interactions
between the traditions of Japan and the West, viewing his life in the United States
and England as the main stages where he played this mediating role. At the same
time, however interesting these interpretations may be, they have virtually ignored
the material, political and racialized terms by which these interactions took place.
That is to say, that Noguchi had such an influence on many of America’s and
Europe’s most prominent writers is obviously significant; these revelations make a
strong case for more recognition and critical attention for Noguchi. Yet, in order for
him to rise to this position in the English- speaking literary world, he had to first
establish himself as a Japanese in an era infused with the Orientalist and racist
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49
ideology seen in parts of American society. Exactly how Noguchi accomplished all
he did in light of the times that he lived requires further investigation.
In addition, this emphasis on Noguchi as in intermediary between Japan and
West has led scholars to generally overlook what Noguchi’s work can tell us about
the experience of those who were literally in between - Japanese immigrants. Only
Marx has attempted to address this issue, recently including an essay on Noguchi’s
life entitled “A Different Mode of Speech” in a 2001 collection of essays, Re
collecting Early Asian America. Although Marx’ s attempt to read Noguchi’s work
in conversation with Asian American studies is admirable, all too often his analysis
of Noguchi’s work tends to skew towards the genre of literary biography and lacks
the sophistication needed to understand the tensions in Noguchi’s writing (a point I
will explore in greater detail below). Thus, Marx’s work can serve as no more than
a useful introduction to Noguchi being that he provides little insight as to ways that
we might situate the writer in a larger context. A more theoretical and rigorous
critical vocabulary is needed to address this project.
As I will attempt to show, the answer on how best to bridge the scholarly
gap lies between the blurring boundaries of the fields of Asian and Asian American
literary studies, and in the transnational and transcultural space where Noguchi’s
positionality is articulated and later warped along multiple lines once he returns to
Japan. With an attention to the power-laden sites of language, race, culture, and
nation, I will show through my readings of some of Noguchi’s important English
works, namely his “autobiographical” tale, The Story o f Yone Noguchi, As Told by
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Himself, and The American Diary o f a Japanese Girl, (as well as brief references to
other writings), that Noguchi’s responses to the materiality of the worlds around
him oscillate between nationalist positions and Orientalist ones, that is, between
multiple acts of “resistance” and of “accommodation,” in Nguyen’s sense (34),
depending on his time, locale and audience. In other words, some aspects of his
writing reveal that Noguchi attempted to engage in a nationalist project in the
United States to bolster his Japanese identity and nation in relation to America and
the West by elevating the esteem of Japan’s literary, cultural and aesthetic heritage.
Thus, he attempted to resist the image of Japan and Japanese people as inferior to
whites. Yet in order to do so, he had to gain an audience, and did so largely by
means of accommodation and pandering to the taste for Orientalia that was in
fashion during the time; that is, he had to engage with the material and discursive
realties of the world, namely the politically uneven terms that characterized
relations between America and Asia in their many manifestations throughout the
Pacific Rim. This approach, I believe, will offer new ways to understand and
situate a writer of his importance, complexity and, often times, contradictoriness.
Walking the Walk, Talking the Talk
The first issue that must be addressed is the extraordinary fact that Noguchi
was familiar enough with the Western and specifically English literary canon to
both influence many of its most prominent figures and be recognized to some
degree as a member of this artistic tradition, or one that he was not “bom into.”
Indeed, the fact that he wrote literature in English makes him somewhat unique
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among Japanese writers of his generation. As I will show, how he was able to do
this, and what lessons he seemed to learn along the way, sets the stage for many of
the issues that he would grapple with throughout his career, specifically the power
laden relationships between language and race, and later literature and the nation.
As described primarily in the chapter, “How I Learned English” of the
“autobiographical” work, The Story ofYone Noguchi, As Told by Himself, his
introduction to the English language in many ways parallels his first encounter with
the United States. Recounting this experience when he was ten-years-old, he says:
My first sensation, when I got a Wilson’s spelling-book in my tenth year,
was something I cannot easily forget; I felt the same sensation when, eight
years later, I first looked upon the threatening vastness of the ocean upon
my embarking on an American liner, where I felt an uneasiness of mind
akin to pain for the conquest of which I doubted my little power.
(Story ofYone Noguchi 1)
For Noguchi, to undertake the learning of a foreign language is commensurate with
embarking on a conquest3 7 towards a foreign land, a daunting task that causes him
to feel an “uneasiness of mind” and to question his “little power.” The realization
that language and nation are bedfellows is further complicated when the young
Noguchi meets “the first foreigner I ever saw,” an American missionary who
visited his school in Nagoya, presumably to preach on religion. When Noguchi
describes watching his English teacher - a Japanese man hired by his town
specifically for the purpose of teaching English - interact with the missionary, he
has this to say: “...we boys soon grew suspicious of his knowledge, which we had
3 7 This is an interesting choice o f words considering the “colonization” project that Japan’s
government had envisioned for Japanese in America.
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thought wonderful at the beginning, when one day an American missionary...called
at our school, and our English teacher seemed not to understand his words” (Story
ofYone Noguchi 3). The fact that Noguchi’s esteemed teacher is deemed suspect
when compared to the American is telling. As I read this passage, Noguchi’s
English teacher, because he is Japanese, cannot measure up to the American
because he is not “native” enough. In other words, he is “inauthentic” as an
authority on the English language because he is not white. Indeed, Noguchi later
admits this, saying, “In those days, when we had little experience with foreigners, a
white skin [sic] and red hair were a sufficient passport for a Western teacher in any
Japanese school” (Story ofYone Noguchi 5). Thus, according to Noguchi’s text,
membership in a particular nation and race is the only credential that one needs in
order to be seen as an authority on its language, in this case, English.
Noguchi, himself, confronts this problem during his first days in America in
1893, as told in the chapter “Some Stories of My Western Life.” Upon arriving,
Noguchi leaves his hotel and ventures about the streets of San Francisco, confident
in his English abilities and admiring the American women around him, a sight he
believes to be a “perfect revelation of freedom and new beauty for my Japanese
eyes” (Story ofYone Noguchi 27). Yet, in spite of these “welcoming sights,” he
gets lost and has a defining encounter with American racism. The passage is worth
quoting at length:
When I felt quite doubtful about my way back to the hotel...I was suddenly
struck by a hard hand from behind, and found a large, red-faced fellow,
somewhat smiling in scorn, who, seeing my face, explained, “Hello Jap!” I
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was terribly indignant to be addressed in such a fashion; my indignation
increased when he ran away, after spitting in my face. I recalled my friend,
who said that I should have such a determination as if I were entering
among enemies; I thrilled from the fear with the uncertainty and even the
darkness of my future. I could not find the way to my hotel, when I felt
everything grow sad at once; in fact, nearly all the houses looked alike.
Nobody seemed to understand my English, in the ability which I trusted;
many of the people coldly passed by even when I tried to speak. I almost
cried, when I found one Japanese, fortunately; he, after hearing my trouble,
exclaimed in laughter: “You are standing right before your hotel, my
friend.”
{Story ofYone Noguchi 28-29)3 8
As this passage demonstrates, Noguchi’s crisis, in its many manifestations, arises
once he is racialized by an American and marked as other through the label “Jap”
and the humiliation of being spit on. It is only then that his means of
communication and survival - English - fails him. In other words, he is, to borrow
Homi Bhabha’s phrase, “not white,” and therefore, “not quite” (131) good enough,
and is as a result lost in an uncertain, cold world of those hostile towards him, of
“enemies,” unable to make himself understood. He is saved only once he finds
someone who can understand and empathize with him, a fellow Japanese.
Through these passages, we see Noguchi coming to understand the
condition of language that Frantz Fanon describes in his exploration of Africa’s
colonial legacy in Black Skin, White Masks', he says: “To speak means to be in a
position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language,
3 8 M arx also quotes this passage in his article on Noguchi to contrast it with a widely
different account that Noguchi gave o f his first experiences in Am erica in other writings.
M arx uses this contrast to support his argument that N oguchi’s “autobiography” is
inconsistent and therefore can also be read as “fiction” - a point that I certainly argee with
- yet he provides no actual analysis o f the text. See Marx, Edward. “A Different M ode o f
Speech,” pp. 292-294.
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but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”
(Fanon 17-18). In other words, language cannot be understood simply as an
abstract system of syntax and signifiers, but also as a crucial aspect o f what it
means to be a part of a particular national context and racial identity. In Noguchi’s
case, then, what would it mean for him to learn and write in the English language?
Could he, in other words, “assume” the culture and civilization of America
considering the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of his race and national
identity when he attempts to immerse himself in the American cultural nexus and
eventually establish himself as a writer? Based upon the two possible readings of
one of the chapters of his autobiography, “Some Stories of My Western Life,” it is
unclear at times whether or not Noguchi considered himself a Japanese in the West
or was attempting to, at least for a while, “try out” life as a “Westerner” while in
America. If the latter is the case, could he be successful?
Not surprisingly, Noguchi presents a positive spin on his journey into
American life and English literature. But his final triumph of becoming an English
poet and writer does not come without further obstacles. As the narrative proceeds
and his ability in English improves, the narrator has an important encounter at a
local San Francisco bookstore. Upon entering, Noguchi finds a romance novel,
-3Q
Dora Thorne by Charlotte M. Brame , that he had read in translation while in
Japan. Overcome by “a sudden desire for its possession” (for the “real thing”)
3 9 Charlotte M. Brame (1836-1884) was an English novelist known for w riting sensational
romance stories, or “dime novels.”
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Noguchi steals the book and returns home, only to find himself later unsatisfied and
overcome with guilt (Story ofYone Noguchi 12). He says: “I was so sorry for such
a shameful act when I returned home; and my sorrow grew larger when my mind, I
dare say of considerable literary taste at least for my age, found the book did not
encourage my soul’s curiosity” (Story ofYone Noguchi 12). Thus, he decides to
return the book and confess his crime to the shopkeeper. To the narrator’s surprise,
the following happens:
“How glad the old man was to hear my story. He wanted to express his
forgiveness emphatically when he asked me if I wished to take some book
or books to read. I was glad that my crime was forgiven in a really nice
way, and more glad that I gained a good friend from whom I could draw out
the books to read. He handed me Keats’ book of poems...”
(Story ofYone Noguchi 13)
As I read this encounter, Noguchi first attempts to make English literature his own
by an act of thievery; in doing so he implicitly acknowledges that English is
something that is not rightfully his (more than likely due to the aforementioned
obstacles), and is therefore left unsatisfied. The narrator is validated, however, by
the American shopkeeper’s kindness, a gesture which, in effect, invites Noguchi
“into the club,” the world of English, by giving him the work of one of its masters,
John Keats, for free. Noguchi then spends nearly all of the rest of his narrative
recounting the time he spends learning the “great writers” of the Anglo-American
cannon, including Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), P.B. Shelly (1792-1822), Henry
Thoreau (1817-1872) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892), among others, displaying
his knowledge of writers whom he has made his own.
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Noguchi has another experience with literary theft when he is charged with
plagiarizing the work of Edgar Allan Poe.4 0 Noguchi takes the opportunity to
defend himself in his autobiography explaining, “I was glad for having the moment
when I felt the same thought with Poe, and I could not understand why I could not
say the same thing if I wanted to say it” (19). Indeed, Noguchi mentions in the
previous page that due to his study and love for Poe’s work, “I felt I was a Poe
myself, and could not speak any other language but Poe’s” {Story ofYone Noguchi
18). Noguchi makes another rebuttal in the next chapter, “Some Stories of My
Western Life,” only this time he recounts how he was defended by American
literati, including the editor of the Examiner and the Book Buyer, an East coast
poetry magazine (Story ofYone Noguchi 42-44). According to Noguchi, the editor
of the Book Buyer says:
“He has originality enough, if that were the full equipment of a great
writer. Beauty and delicacy of though are in his work, and imagination to
spare. But the imagery is often so exotic as to perplex, as when Oriental
music falls on Western ears. But he did not steal his cadences from Poe, not
from anybody else.”
{Story ofYone Noguchi 44)
In terms of rhetorical strategies, Noguchi’s writings on this affair are fascinating.
Again, like his experience in the bookstore, he is charged with stealing something
that does not “naturally” belong to him. Noguchi’s response, in this case, is two
4 0 It is pointed out by a reader that Noguchi, in one o f his published poems, “The H eights,”
writes the following lines, “I dwelt alone, / Like one-eyed star, / In frightened, darksome
willow threads, / In world o f moan, / M y soul is stagnant dawn” (18). In P oe’s poem,
“Eulalie,” there are the following lines, “I dwelt alone. / In a w orld o f moan, / And my soul
was a stagnant tide“ (19).
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fold: firstly, he argues that he and Poe had felt the same thing and therefore it was
natural that they wrote a similar poem. That is, their interiorities were in harmony -
they spoke the same language - and thus the fact that they wrote similar lines was a
cause for celebration.4 1 Secondly, he points out how American literati came to his
aid. Again, this serves as a gesture of welcome; he is a member of the elite group of
English writers and his “own kind” have defended him.
At the same time, the fact that Noguchi has learned the language does not
make him a white American, as other points in his narrative indicate. That is,
although he may be “trying on the clothes of Western life” through its language, a
fact that gives him parity with “whiteness,” he is equally resolute in his
“Japaneseness.” His story of how he “became a burglar or a thief for my
[Noguchi’s] stupidity” - also included within his narrative on experience with
English - is an example of this (Story ofYone Noguchi 22). In it, he tells of how he
inadvertently helps a man rob an apartment and is subsequently jailed. Asked by a
“Spanish or Mexican” to help carry some things out of an apartment, the owner of
which the man claims to know, Noguchi does, only to be “pursued by a large fat
Irish policeman, who took us by force to a police station and duly locked us up”
(Story ofYone Noguchi 22). How Noguchi claims to get out of the situation,
rhetorically speaking, is what interests me here. The next day, Noguchi makes the
4 1 Although Noguchi claims otherwise, it is also possible that he was practicing honka dori,
a practice o f allusion long used in Japanese literature. Although according to American
literary standards, N oguchi’s writing could have been construed as plagerism, to traditional
Japanese conventions, N oguchi’s copying o f Poe’s work could have been an attempt to
express his admiration for the American writer.
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“first and last public speech of my foreign life,” presumably before authorities, in
which he uses his cultural background as evidence for his “innocence.” He writes:
“I believe that my little speech was a masterpiece, in which I said that it was a case
of Japanese etiquette or humanity turned to crime in America by wrong
application” (Story ofYone Noguchi 23). Although awkwardly put, what Noguchi
is essentially asserting is his cultural difference; that is, even though what he did, in
America, could be considered a crime, according to his Japanese standards, for
Noguchi not to help the man would be an unforgivable act as it would constitute a
breech of “etiquette,” a denial of his sense of “humanity.” Thus, with his new
powers of language, Noguchi is able to assert his identity, and thereby claim an
equal place among whites, even through his “non-native” tongue.
Noguchi offers his final proof that he has learned the language through the
presentation of one of his poems at the end of the work, originally published in his
book, From the Eastern Sea42. He says all too modestly, “I was glad that, my
English knowledge, however little it might have been, and my inspiration played
together most harmoniously, I could turn out something as follows [sic]:
‘Twas mom;
I felt the whiteness of her brow
Over my face; I raised my eyes and saw
The breezes passing on dewy feet.
‘Twas noon:
Her slightly trembling lips of passion
4 2 From the Eastern Sea was first published independently by Noguchi, and then by
Unicom Press, both in London and in 1903.
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I saw, I felt; but where she smiled
Were only yellow flashes of sunlight.
‘Twas eve;
The velvet shadows of her hair unfolded me;
I eagerly stretched my hand to grasp her.
But touched the darkness of eve.
‘Twas night;
I heard her eloquent violent eyes
Whispering love, but from the heaven
Gazed down the stars in gathering tears.”
{Story ofYone Noguchi 24)
As I read the poem, in this situation, Noguchi employs a traditional masculinist
trope of equating his mastery of language to his ability to enjoy the love of women.
In other words, Noguchi performs his arrival as a Japanese poet in English on
multiple levels: not only did the poem, presented in the conclusion of the story, get
eventually published by a Western press - an act of acceptance - the poem itself is
the story of the love between the poet, presumably Noguchi himself, and the object
of his desire - a woman. Thus, he attempts to spin his story as a triumphant one. He
gets what he wants in every way possible: the English language, acceptance in the
English literary world, and women.4 3 Or does he? The language of the poem
suggests that the woman does have feelings for the poet. She is, after all, described
as having “trembling lips of passion” and “eloquent violet eyes/ Whispering love.”
4 3 If we recall, Noguchi em ployed a similar trope in the account o f his first days in
California. His enjoym ent o f the beauty o f American women is seen as a welcoming
gesture under his masculine gaze. As I read the passage, he seems to believe that he too can
have what Am erica has to offer, namely “freedom,” that is until he is assaulted and labeled
as an Other through the racist label o f “Jap.”
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Yet, interestingly, the speaker is never able to consummate the affair. Her smile
disappears into “yellow flashes of sunlight.” Her hair that enfolds him morphs into
“the darkness of eve” when he reaches out to grasp it. And finally, when she
whispers her words of love to him, they are admonished by the heavens whose eyes
grow wet with tears. Thus, the question we must consider is this: does Noguchi
ever truly get what he wants? Is his relationship with English one of mastery?
Notice, for instance, the remarks made by the publisher, Gelett Burgess, about
Noguchi’s first book of poetry, “Seen and Unseen, or Monologues o f a Homeless
Snail” : “He has lifted the veil of convention and discovered fresh beauties and
unexpected charms in our speech.” If we recall, the editor of the Book Buyer used
Noguchi’s otherness as proof that he could not have copied Poe, being that his
poetry was exotic like “Oriental music” on “Western ears. Thus, although no one
can question that Noguchi was successful, it was a limited and conditioned success.
And although Noguchi wants to claim otherwise, his relationship to the English
language, as with America as a whole, must be seen as one of ambiguity. As I will
explore in the remainder of this chapter, he would grapple with this tension on
multiple levels throughout his career.
Between Resistance and Accommodation
As mentioned earlier, there is a great deal about Noguchi’s writing that may
lead us to conclude that he is a nationalist, or one who writes to empower his
identity and that of his people and culture. He is a nationalist when he speaks
proudly of Japan’s literary and aesthetic traditions, as seen in works such as The
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Spirit o f Japanese Poetry4 4 , his treatise on Japanese poetics and aesthetics. In it, he
argues for the value of Japanese poetry and aesthetics compared to Western
traditions, claiming that English poets “waste too much energy on ‘words words
words’” (iSelected Writings: Prose 57). Western theater as well, Noguchi claims,
could learn much from Japan:
...it would be certainly [sic] a great thing if the No (sic) drama could be
properly introduced into the West; the result would be no small protest
against the Western stage, it would mean a real revelation for those people
who are well tired of their own plays with a certain pantomimic spirit
underneath.
(.Selected Writings: Prose 57)4 5
As we see, through his argument about Japanese aesthetics, he attempts to elevate
his identity and Japan’s reputation. Such is one strategy in his nationalist project.
But his nationalism extends beyond assertions of the value of Japan’s
cultural sensibilities; it is also present in the great sensitivity he displays towards
Japan’s image, towards how his nation is being represented by others; in many
instance, he lashes out against the stereotypes of Japanese and “Orientals,” as he
attempts to educate others on Japan and its culture, particularly in regards to their
differences with other Asian peoples. This is most clearly seen in The Story ofYone
Noguchi As Told by Himself For instance, in “How I Learned English,” Noguchi
speaks of the indignation he feels at what he believes to be inaccurate perceptions
4 4 The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (London: J. M urray, 1914).
4 5 It is interesting that W.B. Yeats would respond to N oguchi’s call w ith his Noh dramas,
his m ost famous being, At the Hawk’ s Well, published in 1916. See Hakutani’s “W.B.
Yeats, M odernity, and the Noh Play” in Modernity in East-West Literary Criticism: New
Readings. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (London: Associated University Presses, 2001).
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of Japan by the American public; he writes: “The vogue of the Mikado4 6 or the
Geisha47, a comic opera, at the time made my true Japanese heart pained, as I
thought it was a blasphemy against Japan; how I often wished to shout from the pit
or gallery on its absurdity” (Story ofYone Noguchi 16).
Also relevant is his attention to the works of other Asian writers in
America. In 1907, three years after his return to Japan, Noguchi wrote a two-part
article in the publication, Taiyd (The Sun Trade Journal), condemning the Asian
American writer, Onoto Watanna for her depictions of Japanese people and
culture in her work. Briefly, Noguchi, analyzing a theatrical piece based on her
1901 novel, A Japanese Nightingale4 9 and her 1904 book, Love o f the Azalea50,
proceeds to critique the “authenticity” of her work, particularly what he perceives
to be cultural inaccuracies in how she represents her characters. Focusing on
particular details in her narrative in order to reveal her misrepresentations, such as
wisterias blooming before cherry blossoms and characters who put oranges and
persimmons on the same table, Noguchi argues that “the authoress does not know
much about things Japanese” being that such things, he contends, would never
46 The Mikado was written by W illiam Gilbert (1836-1911) and A rthur Sullivan (1842-
1900) and originally performed in 1885 in London.
47 Noguchi is referring to a 1986 opera by English composer Sidney Jones (1861-1946).
4 8 Onoto W atanna (1875-1954) was the pen name for W innifred Eaton, a popular novelist
o f the early twentieth century and one of the first recognized Asian American writers. O f
European and Chinese ancestry, W atanna created a persona as a Japanese woman and
became known for her Japanese Romances. For a study o f W atanna’s work, see Viet
N gyuen’s chapter, “The Origins of Asian American Literature,” in his book, Race and
Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
4 9 A Japanese Nightingale (New York: Harper, 1901)
5 0 Love of the Azalea (New York: Dodd, M ead & Co., 1904)
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happen in Japan. Furthermore, he attacks Watanna’s dialogue, saying she defames
the Japanese by having them speak in a “pigeon language” spoken “nowhere in
Japan.” Accusing Watanna of “creating Japanese custom and habit,” Noguchi
concludes that her work “is one of the saddest literary creations which ever
attempted to pass as a Japanese story” (Taiyd 20-21). In acts like these, we see
signs of Noguchi’s nationalism.
It is possible then to see his writings as a project of resistance, as attempts
to right the wrongs of misrepresentation by providing an “authentic,” depiction
born from one who believes that he is a “true Japanese.” For such reasons, it seems
all to easy to valorize him as a minoritized writer rising up to claim his place in the
world, especially if we read him to be an Asian American poet. Yet, the fact
remains that in order for him to establish a position from which he could “set the
record straight,” Noguchi had to gain acceptance in the American literary world
and negotiate with American society in all its imperfection. He too, at times, seems
to have accepted America’s structural racism and had, therefore, no choice but to
situate Japanese within it.5 1 Thus, it is ironic that Noguchi condemns Watanna
being that he was in many ways in a similar position that she was, as I will now
show.
5 1 In addition, the fact that he is writing as a Japanese, attempting to represent a nation who
was exhibiting im perialist ambitions, and later whole-heartedly adopts a violent stance
towards “Japan’s enemies” must complicate our reading as N oguchi’s nationalism. As I am
attempting to show, one way in which we can situate Noguchi is beyond the often-times
simplistic act o f valorizing or dismissing a particular w riter due to our own present
political beliefs. Thereby, I believe, we can begin to better understanding his work in all its
complexity as well as its historical context.
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Although Noguchi, in some cases, strives to resist American racism in order
to elevate his Japanese identity, in other cases, Noguchi seems to subscribe to
American racism’s conceptions of the Japanese. In his essay, “Chicago,” for
instance, he states: “How foolishly the Japanese look in brown skin and dreamy
eyes. Brown itself is the colour of melancholy and stupidity... Brown is like night.
The white-skinend Americans are like the day...” (Story ofYone Noguchi 90). Yet
at other times, Noguchi negotiates America’s racial hierarchy and attempts to
elevate his status by discriminating against other racial or ethnic groups. For
instance, in his work, “Chicago,” it is Chinese that get the brunt o f his ignorance.
He says awkwardly:
“Chicago? That’s American!” I exclaimed. “That’s American” means
great, as “that’s German” means steady, and that’s “French” means artistic,
and “that’s English” means comfortable, and “that’s Japanese” means
dainty, and “that’s Chinese” means gross. You ask me what I mean by
“great?” Chicago is America. America without Chicago would lose what is
America.
(Story ofYone Noguchi 103)
As we can see, the only way for him to establish a position for Japanese in a society
that denies them inclusion is by situating them on the totem pole of racial and
national hierarchy and lowering the status of others. In this passage, not
surprisingly, white America is privileged; yet Japan is no longer at the bottom
because Noguchi has adopted an Orientalist conception of Chinese (one, in fact,
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that is not dissimilar to the view professed by many elite Japanese immigrants at
the time.)5 2
In addition, inasmuch as he did attempt to resist racism directed at Japanese
in America through his nationalist discourse, it is my belief that he also had to
employ strategies of accommodation and even at times auto-Orientalization so as to
accomplish his goals. In other words, he had to write within the discourse of
Orientalism and pander to its tastes for the exotic in order to be popular. Thus, he
had to reinscribe the stereotype in order to attempt to subvert it let alone educate
the public on his views of such matters as Japanese poetry and aesthetics; thereby
he employs multiple strategies of “resistance” and “accommodation.” Once again,
the ambiguity that characterized his English writings’ relationship to power again
comes to the fore.
Many of these tensions can be seen in Noguchi’s prose work, The American
Diary o f a Japanese Girl. Written under the penname, “Miss Morning Glory,” the
novel is the story of a young, upper-class woman of Meiji Japan who travels about
America with her chaperon Uncle, visiting different cities and meeting Americans
as well as Japanese dignitaries along the way. The fact that Noguchi chooses to
mask himself in a feminine persona is an interesting and double-sided gesture. The
tradition of changing genders when writing has long been a strategy in Japanese
literature, the most famous being the author of the classical work, Tosa Diary (Tosa
Nikki), who was a man who wrote under a female persona. Also, the name of
5 2 See A zum a’s Between Two Empires, in particular pp. 36-41.
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Noguchi’s main character, “Morning Glory,” when literally translated into
Japanese, denotes the flower known as asagao, or “Morning Face. ” In that sense,
perhaps the title character is a reference to the many famous heroines in Japanese
literature whose names are flowers, the most obvious being Asagao and also
Yugao, or “Evening Faces,” both characters in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale o f
Genji. At the same time, we must not forget that Noguchi was writing for an
American audience largely ignorant of Japanese literature and culture. As such, the
fact that Noguchi presents himself under a feminized guise may have been intended
to appease his American audience, hungry in the wake of such works as Madame
Butterfly for images of a feminized Orient . Moreover, it could reflect Noguchi’s
perceptions on the status of Japan and Japanese within America’s racialized
imaginary; that is, Noguchi could be revealing his own feelings of emasculation by
submitting to the idea of Japan as a feminized nation and culture.
We see this sentiment throughout the text as well. For instance, in
beginning of the novel, while still in Japan, Noguchi writes of Morning Glory
ruminating on what her experiences in America will be and how it will affect her.
She says:
I stole into the looking glass - woman loses almost her delight in life if
without it-/ for the last glimpse of my hair in Japan style. / Butterfly mode! /
I'll miss it adorning my small head, while I'm away from home. I have often
thought that /Japanese display Oriental rhetoric - only oppressive rhetoric
that palsies the /spirit-in hair dressing. Its beauty isn't animation. / 1 longed
for another new attraction on my head. / 1 felt sad, however, when I cut off
5 3 Ironically, the character as well as the title o f the book as to be “Ocho-san,” or literally,
“Butterfly.” See Duus, p.25
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all the paper cords from my hair. /I dreaded that the American method of
dressing the hair might change my head /into an absurd little thing. My
lengthy hair languished over my shoulders. / 1 laid me down on the bamboo
porch in the pensive shape of a mermaid fresh / from the sea.
{American Diary 10-11)5 4
This passage circulates many of the Orientalist tropes seen in the writings of those
like Lafcadio Hearn; Noguchi exploits the vogue of works like The Geisha through
his description of Morning Glory’s “butterfly” hair and her being “small” and
“quaint.” Moreover, through his lush poetic depiction of the girl laid out on her
“bamboo porch” like a “mermaid fresh from the sea,” he paints an exoticized other
for his readership, a dainty Japanese reflecting on her inassimilability into
American life through the metaphor of hair-styling. Later, Noguchi continues this
strategy even after Morning Glory’s arrival in California by having her resolve to
“remain an Oriental girl, like a cherry blossom smiling softly in the Spring
moonlight” in spite of how her experiences in America might change her
{American Diary 60).
In addition, Noguchi’s choice of writing-style deserves some attention. He
decides to have Morning Glory write in an awkward, often times incorrect, form of
English. For instance, she uses words like “Meriken” instead of American, or
“Amerikey” instead of America. Although Noguchi did, at times, struggle with the
English language and required the help of friends, most notably Leonie Gilmore,
the mistakes in the text are so blatant that I believe we must conclude that it was
5 4 Although “The American Diary o f a Japanese G irl” is a prose work, Noguchi combines
certain poetic techniques, including line breaks, throughout the work. I have chosen to cite
those breaks in my quotations with the standard mark.
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mostly intentional. Like his choice in persona, this textual strategy is double-edged.
That is, it is an interesting possibility that Noguchi, on the one hand, is attempting
to perform through his writing the process of learning and inhabiting another
language, with all its difficulties, one that he himself likely went through. Yet, in
terms of how this choice was received by his readership, it seems that again, it only
served to emphasize his narrator’s otherness; this is confirmed by The P ost’ s
review of Noguchi’s work:
To no one but a Japanese woman could many of the reflections come that
here given with a naivete that is as refreshing as it is charming. In spite of
Miss Morning Glory’s familiarity with English idiom, her use of the
language is to this extent characteristically Japanese, in that she cannot
escape from the discursive style, the choppy sentences and lack of sequence
in her remarks; and pronouns are troublesome things to one in whose native
tongue they are non-existent.
Similar sentiments are echoed by another Chicago based publication, The Journal
as well: “All the surprise that filled the quaint little Oriental mind on beholding a
strange land glows in the words of the diary, words chosen as only a Japanese girl
could choose them.”5 5 Although the reviews presented are intended to praise
Noguchi’s work, what interests me here is the fact that the text, by exploiting
Morning Glory’s awkward English, seems to reaffirm certain preconceptions of
Japanese for these American reviews. Thus, again we see a gesture of
accommodation towards his English-speaking readership.
5 5 These reviews were presented in the back pages o f the original version o f The American
Diaries of a Japanese Girl.
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Finally, and most strikingly, is Noguchi’s use of racial slurs in the text.
Bluntly put, the word “Japanese” becomes interchangeable with the word “Jap”
throughout the story; examples are so bountiful that they all could not be recounted
here. That Noguchi perceived the place of Japanese in the American landscape as
being abjected is not surprising; if we recall his reflection on racial hierarchy in
“Chicago,” he seemed to have assumed a lower position for Japanese in relation to
other nationalities in his attempts to engage with mainstream American society.
Nonetheless, the extent to which Noguchi uncritically writes within the discourse
of structural racism is still deserving of our attention. Marx attempts to explain the
use of epithets in this way:
He determined not to be bothered by the term “Jap” and even came to use it
frequently himself. And he rarely spoke in his English writings about the
experience of racism, presumably believing along with other Japanese that
it would disappear when they proved themselves worthy of equal treatment.
(“A Different Mode of Speech” 294).
Marx’s assessment is highly flawed on multiple levels. His statement that Noguchi
was determined not to be bothered by the label “Jap” runs contrary to Noguchi’s
sentiments on racism against Japanese that he expresses in his other writings; nor
does this take into account the possibility that Noguchi has, either consciously or
unconsciously, internalized the racist discourse on some level and that his blithe
use of the term “Jap” was a symptom of that process. Moreover, one wonders how
Marx presumes that Noguchi and other Japanese believed that discrimination
would disappear once they proved themselves worthy without proving any
evidence for the claim (not to mention discussing what immigrant Japanese did to
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prove themselves unworthy of equal treatment). Finally, his assessment that
Noguchi rarely discussed American racism is also in need of rethinking. It is my
argument that Noguchi, in spite of his use of accommodationist strategies, did, in
fact, attempt to resist American racism, as I have attempted to show thus far. Yet
interestingly, even within The American Diary o f a Japanese Girl, this is the case.
That is to say, although there is accommodation in Noguchi’s text, his approach is
not homogenous. And his protagonist is not without agency.
At the other times in the work, Noguchi seems well aware of the
objectification of Japanese in America and attempts to defy it. This is seen in
Morning Glory’s reactions to what she believes to be misrepresentations of
Japanese, and Asians in general, in American popular culture. For instance, while
trying to teach Japanese to an American acquaintance the following happens:
“Chon kina! Chon kina!”/ Thus Dorothy repreated. It was a Japanese song,
she / said, which the geisha girls sung in “The Geisha.” / Tat, tat, tat, stop
Dorothy! / Truly it was the opening sound - not the words - / of a
nonsensical song. I presume that “The Geisha” is practising [sic] a
plenteous /injustice to Dai Nippon/1 recalled on Meriken consul who jolted
out that same / song once at a party. / He became no more a gentleman to
me after that.
{American Diary 70)
As this passage shows, in order to teach others about her language and culture,
Morning Glory must contend with the preconceptions of Japan that have been
created in popular culture through works like “The Geisha.” At times, this borders
on having to deal with the absurdity of baseless stereotypes. The following passage
is another example:
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I went to the gallery of the photographer Taber, / and posed in Nippon “pera
pera.” / The photographer spread before me many pictures of the actress in
the part of “Geisha.” / She was absurd. / 1 cannot comprehend where
‘Mericans get the conception that Jap girls are eternally smiling puppets. /
Are we crazy to smile without motive?...The photographer handed me a fan.
/ Alas! It was a Chinese fan in a crude mixture of colour. / He urged me to
carry it. / 1 declined, saying: / “Nobody fan’s in cool November.
(American Diary 66-67)
As we see, although Morning Glory is Orientalized by the photographer, she is not
without recourse. Her resistance is located both in her discursive critique of the
“’Merican...conception” and also in her performative refusal to hold the Chinese
fan and conform to the stereotype. Again, she does the same when vowing not to
feed any hunger for Orientalia:
I imagined myself hitting off a tune of "Karan Coron" with clogs, in
circumspect steps, along Fifth Avenue of somewhere. The throng swarmed
around me. They tugged my silken sleeves, which almost swept the ground,
and inquired, "How much a yard?" Then they implored me to sing some
Japanese ditty. I'll not play any sensational role for any price.
{American Diary 13)
These defiant passages are interesting ones. Although Noguchi’s writing is clearly
located in an Orientalist paradigm in order to appeal to his mainstream American
audience, his character is not powerless. It is in Morning Glory’s refusal to sell her
kimono and “play any sensational role of any price” that we see Noguchi
attempting to resist Orientalism. In other words, perhaps it is the fact that he first
employs a strategy of exoticization that enables him to later deny or critique it
through his reluctance to feed it any further.
Finally, Noguchi’s liberal and abundant use of untranslated Japanese
throughout his text may be another site where we can detect resistance. For
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instance, in the aforementioned passage, Noguchi uses the Japanese onomatopoeia
“Karan Koron” to denote the sound of Morning Glory’s geta (sandals) walking on
the street. At another point, he refers to her diary as a nikki without explaining the
word (American Diary 96). In fact, examples are so plenteous that they all cannot
be included here. Marx posits that the “aggressive use of Japanese words” may
have irritated readers and is one possible reason for its relative commercial failure
(“A Different Mode of Speech” 302). Although this may have been true, we can
also see a defiant posture in Noguchi’s decision to include Japanese without
offering an explanation, one that Marx again fails to explore. In other words, the
use of Japanese and experiments with a hybridized English/Japanese form of
writing can be seen as an attempt by Noguchi to speak in a language closer to his
own; his experiments are, therefore, as a form of resistance in that he is attempting
to appropriate English for his own purposes and speak on his own terms. Thus,
although his choice to have Morning Glory write in awkward English is one of
accommodation, her use of Japanese is stance of resistance. As we have seen, both
strategies of accommodation and resistance are at work in the text and must be
given their due.
Noguchi and Early Japanese America
Speaking on the multiple strategies that Japanese immigrants used to
negotiate the contradiction of being Japanese subjects, tied to the “homeland” by
culture and race, yet situated in an America society that often times denied them the
status of “equal” that they sought, Azuma notes that:
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Japanese immigrant identities...moved across and between the bounded
meanings and binaries of race and nation that each regime imposed upon
them, rejecting exclusive judgments by either. As such, their ideas and
practices were situational, elastic, and even inconsistent at times, but always
dualistic at the core. The eclecticism illuminates the intricate agency of
these actors, who selectively took in and fused elements of nationalist
arguments, modernist assumptions, and racist thinking both from
Imperialist Japan and white America.
(6)
This dualism, or ambivalence, was particularly strong in Noguchi’s case. He
became an English poet, yet did so seemingly to assert the importance of his
Japanese identity. Yet in order to do that, he had to gain acceptance among
American literati and readers, which required that he accept certain Orientalist
terms of American racism even as he attempted to subvert them. Through this
process, and with whatever agency Noguchi could muster, he negotiated his sense
of self and artistic goals with the “eclecticism” that many in early Japanese
America employed, for better or for worse. Nonetheless, through his negotiations
with the materiality of his day, as well as with the issues of identity, nationalism
and race he provides a valuable window into Japanese-American relationship as
well as early immigrant life.
Yet, early Asian American literature, as well, is characterized by similar
dilemmas. As Viet Nguyen notes, “The options of the bad subject and the model
minority that are offered by American racism toward Asian Americans and
generally accepted by Asian American intellectuals are inadequate in terms of
evaluating the flexible political strategies of Asian Americans, past or present”
(34). For such reasons, reading literary texts simply in terms of resistance or
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accommodation, of good bad subjects and bad model minorities, is inadequate, for
it fails to grasp the complexity of political and textual acts that are performed
through the available means at the time. Although Noguchi did, as a Japanese,
establish himself and influence the course of Western literature, it did not come
without a price; in order to understand the ambivalence present in his writings, we
cannot simply look at the interaction of literary and cultural traditions in ahistorical
terms, as Noguchi scholars too often have, but must also consider the material
circumstances by which that took place. Nor can we dismiss him outright because
certain aspects of his writing are problematic or “politically incorrect.” Like Hearn,
it is the ambiguity that is present in the writings of Noguchi that make him
historically significant. As I will show in the conclusion o f this thesis, this
ambivalence that both writers display may be the key to a deeper understanding of
them.
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Conclusion
Notes Towards a Trans-Pacific, Japanese-American Hybridity
Claims to identity are nominative or normative, in a preliminary,
passing moment; they are never nouns when they are culturally
productive or historically progressive.
(Homi Bhabha The Location o f Culture 335).
By exploring how Noguchi and Hearn responded to the material and
discursive realities of their day, I have tried to show the great sense of ambivalence
that both men displayed in their writings towards the power-laden issues of race,
culture, language, nation as well as their evolving senses of self in relation to the
perceived other. Their responses in no way can be characterized as homogenous or
homological. Rather, at different times and in different circumstances, even within
a single work, they have displayed multiple, conflicting attitudes and have
performed varying strategies in response to the discourses and politics that they
were encountering. For Hearn, I have explored the contradictory attitudes that he
has displayed in his writing towards the Japan as he encountered and imagined it;
on the one hand, he has seemingly accepted certain terms of Orientalism and has
recycled these assumptions of essential difference and resultant tensions between
racialized people in some of his writings on the Japanese people and culture. On the
other hand, in other works, he shows a great sense of ambiguity and even disdain
for this Western positionality that he has so clearly aligned himself with and
explores strategies that may attempt to subvert this perceived gulf of East and
West. For Noguchi, I have focused on the ambivalence with which he negotiates
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his particular Japanese nationalism against the backdrop of an American society
whose racist strictures denied him any sense of parity. As a result, he at times had
to accommodate American racism - a process which included not only lowering
the status of his Japanese identity through practices of auto-Orientalism but also by
projecting racism at other groups in America’s racial hierarchy - in order to gain a
literary status by which he could appease his “Japanese pride.” Yet even if this
status was compromised, it is equally important that Noguchi did accomplish much
as a Japanese writer abroad being that his English writings were able to critique
certain aspects of American racism as well as influence perceptions of Japanese art
and culture, something that few other Japanese, immigrants or otherwise, in his
generation were able to do to such a degree.
As I will explore in this conclusion, these heterogenous and ambivalent
aspects of their works enable us to better situate their literature as cultural products
dealing with early Japanese-American ties; these elements in their texts also
suggest new ways of understanding Hearn and Noguchi’s significance as writers of
their times within respective canons and cultures through which they pass. Indeed,
as I contend, the respective ambivalence with which both writers grappled with the
materiality that they encountered suggests that neither fit neatly into the polarities
of East and West as they were conceived in their day; this in-between
positionalitiy, for both Hearn and Noguchi, is a key to understanding both writers.
Homi Bhabha has argued in his 1994 book, The Location o f Culture, for an
increased awareness of an interstitial “Third Space” in both the performative-
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speech act as well as in the general production of culture (53). Attention to this
space, he continues, in particular to its temporality and inherent ambiguity, helps us
to understand and deconstruct not only the workings of power but also to enact
strategies that may subvert its force. He writes:
...we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ - the cutting edge of translation
and negotiation, the inbetween space - that carries the burden of meaning in
culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist
histories of the ‘people.’ And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude
the politics of polarity and emerge as the other of our selves.
(56 Italics in the Original)
As I believe, it is possible to detect, in the works of both Hearn and Noguchi, a
Third Space through which they traveled in their writings, albeit for different
reasons and in varying circumstances. That is to say, as a result of their sometimes
alienated positionalities in relation to their respective “nations” - meaning not just
their countries but also their races, cultures and artistic traditions - Noguchi and
Hearn both experienced and experimented with a sense of alterity in their writings
and identities. In doing so, and although it may have been for only fleeting
moments, while passing through this interstitial space, both men laid claim to a
mode of being that was unique to their time.
It is important to note, however, that the notion of the Third Space that I am
analyzing in relation to Noguchi and Hearn is not the same sense of in-betweenness
experienced and examined by some in the post-colonial era; that is to say, the
“nationalist, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’” of which Bhabha is
attempting to envision in lieu of the de-colonized, post-World War II world were
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not available to either men; nor did their institiality lend itself to more
contemporary forms of transnationalism or cosmopolitanism, in other words, a
world “beyond” nation-states. Indeed, I believe that their ambivalence within their
own contexts attests to what Azuma has described as the central theme of the Issei
experience: the “potency of the national within transnationalism” (14). This is true,
of course, for Noguchi as member and participant in this generation; yet, as I will
show, this is equally apt for Hearn as well. In other words, their writings evince the
power of categories and concepts such as nation, race, culture and artistic traditions
within their times. Their work, therefore, must always be contextualized within the
historical realities of their day, of what they could and could not consciously do.
What is significant, then, is that even through both writers could not have
consciously sought or chosen alternatives to the polarities of their day due to their
conceptual unavailibity, their writings and actions gesture towards them none the
less - through a Third Space, an in-between place, and towards, as I will explore at
the end of this chapter, a hybrid form of life that threatened the solidity of
Japanese-America. Such will be the thrust of my concluding remarks.
Hearn: A Wandering Self
The significance of Hearn’s “turning Japanese” is a topic that has been
debated by scholars from his lifetime until this very day. Some, like Harootunian,
have argued that “Hearn desperately tried to become Japanese” (“Preface”
Aesthetics o f Diversity x) while others have noted that while Hearn did take
Japanese citizenship, he came to regret the decision greatly (Chamberlain, qtd. in
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Hirakawa 9). I am less interested in Hearn’s act from a psychological perspective -
that is, of why Hearn decided to “turn Japanese,” or how much he was able to do
so, that is of degrees of Japaneseness or Westemness. Such questions, although
interesting from a biographical point of view, tend to leave the terms at stake -
such as East and West, Japan and the U.S. - relatively intact rather than treating
them as unstable entities in and of themselves. Thus, what I am concerned with
here is Hearn’s “becoming Japanese” from a symbolic or performative perspective.
Considering the essentialized approach Hearn seems to take towards questions of
race and country at certain points in his writings, it would seem that such a move,
“turning Japanese,” becoming Koizumi Yakumo, would be an impossible one. Yet,
he did so. How can we understand this?
Rosenberg has noted that for Hearn, with the process and momentary
conclusion of writing, “Every certainty about East and West, past and future, Japan
and himself is called to question” (239). Naoko Sugiyama has argued, as well, that
the affection Hearn felt for his subject brought out through writing about them
often times led Hearn to see the “Other in himself and himself in the Other”; in
doing so, she adds, Hearn attempted to “deconstruct the hierarchical world
order...the distinction of the self and the Other, and consequently created texts
which appreciate the differences in different people” (190). Along similar lines, I
would like to explore how Hearn’s taking of Japanese citizenship can be read in
light of the binaries of East and West, other and self that he grappled with. I would
like to suggest that Hearn’s adoption of Japan can be read not so much as a literal
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“becoming” as it is a willingness to leave behind; it is therefore a performative
challenge to identity itself, that is to the distinctions between self and other that
characterized East-West relations during his time. His becoming Japanese
(regardless of whether he consciously believed that he could) then, can be read as a
gesture that placed his positionality into a radical sense of play, just as he does in
certain writings. In other words, it displayed a willingness to being changed by the
world around him, by the world he wrote of, and that he was now invested in it in a
way that a traditional Orientalist never could. Through this gesture, Hearn, perhaps
unconsciously, attempted to go to a place that the logic of the times could not
account for. Thus, even if it was for fleeting moments, he inhabited a different,
Third Space. He made claim, in Bhabha’s sense, to an alternate identity. No longer
Lafcadio Hearn. Maybe Koizumi Yakumo. Maybe somewhere in between.
How then can we understand his fantastical writings of “Old Japan” in light
of his turning Japanese, of his identarian realignment? After all, it is his books like
Kwaidan and In Ghostly Japan 5 6 that he is most famous for among both Japanese
and non-Japanese alike. How can they be related to what we have explored thus far
in terms of Hearn’s relationship to the material conditions of the times and his
lament of modernity? Interestingly, it is Noguchi who can best aid us in this task. In
1910, Noguchi published Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, a book length study containing
Noguchi’s perspectives on the Hearn along with a piece by Otani Masanobu, a
5 6 In Ghostly Japan was originally published in 1899 in Boston by Little, Brown, and
Company.
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literary assistant and former student of Hearn, and Noguchi’s translation of
Reminisces, by Koizumi Setsu. In the work, Noguchi not only reveals his
admiration for Hearn as writer but also takes great pains to defend Hearn from
cn
contemporary critics, most notably George Gould . Interestingly, the rhetoric that
Noguchi uses to defend Hearn is anti-racist in thrust; he accuses critics of Hearn of
being Orientalists in their condemnation of him, writing that Gould’s “denunciation
of Hearn is at the same time a denunciation of Japan” (Hearn in Japan 20). The
reason Noguchi was able to do this is what interests me here: in short, it is because
Noguchi considered Hearn a part of Japan’s canon. In other words, in Noguchi’s
estimation, Hearn’s arrival and subsequent work in Japan fulfilled a particular need
during the turn of the century Meiji Japan.
What was it? Was Hearn’s love of “traditional” Japan a needed ego-boost
for a nation attempting to find its place on the world stage? Perhaps. Did Heam’s
essentialisms in fact reinforce during that time (and perhaps even now) certain
beliefs of a “unique Japanese culture” that resonated with the idealized self-image
for some Japanese, as Ota has argued? This may also be true in many cases. Yet,
what Noguchi identifies is what I’d like to explore here; for the Japanese poet, it is
in Heam’s re-workings of Japanese legends and folk-lore where his contribution to
Japan lies. Thanks to them, Noguchi writes, “the old romances which we had
5 7 Gould was the author of Concerning Lafcadio Hearn in 1908. A psychologist by
training, in his book he attacks Heam’s character relentlessly as “atheistic, disloyal and
unethical,” for his perceived need to “hate Occidentalism, and exalt with a somewhat
ludicrous praise the vapid, and even pitiful childishness of semi-barbaric Orientalism”
(192).
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forgotten ages ago were brought again to quiver in the air, and the ancient beauty
which we buried under the dust rose again with a strange yet new splendor” {Hearn
in Japan 17). Yet, as Noguchi also intimates, Heam’s fantastical tales are not only
a romanticization of magical, forgotten worlds. They too are worldly; within some
of them, there is a response to the material conditions of Japan and the political
developments of the day. As Noguchi shows us, there is also a possible attempt to
subvert modernizing currents in Japanese society as a result of its contact with the
West. He points us to Heam’s story, “Horai” as proof.
In the tale of “Horai” from the book Kwaidan, Hearn tells of a magical and
forgotten land that appears only through Japanese painting and Chinese writings.
There, it is said that people eat from rice bowls that never go empty; they drink
from cups that never go dry. What was even more impressive, he says, was the
atmosphere, “not made of air, but of ghost.” And when individuals take in this
atmosphere - comprised of “quintillions and quintillions of souls blended into one
immerse translucency” - it has a strange effect, “reshaping his notions of Space and
Time, - so that he can see only as they used to see, feel as only they used to feel,
and think only as they used to think” {Kwaidan 176). It is place, in other words,
that has the power to call everything that one knows into question and transform it
into a different mode o f being predicated on a breakdown of the self through the
interaction with the other.
Victor Segalen (1878-1919), a French writer and contemporary of Heam’s,
has noted that the true value of what he called “universal exoticism” was in its
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power to grant its witness the “ability to conceive otherwise ” (16). The “exot,” or
the true traveler, in search of the exotic:
...calls to, desires, sniffs out these beyonds. But in inhabiting them, in
enclosing them, embracing them, savoring them, the Clump of earth, the
Soil, suddenly and powerfully becomes Diverse. This double-edged
balancing game results in an unflaggering, inexhaustible diversity.
(Segalen 41)
In other words, the exotic has the power to make those who witness it think in an-
other way than they are accustomed, both in terms of how one perceives the self as
well as the world. It is an “inexhaustible diversity” that uses difference to enhance
one’s experience of the world. In a similar vein, Hearn’s vision of “Horai” has this
effect on those who take in its atmosphere. They are too are forever changed,
thinking only as others do, and may never be able to go back to what or where they
were.
But, as Hearn notes, the vision of “Horai” is in danger. Certain movements
in the material world have put its existence into jeopardy. Hearn can only lament its
passing in the following way:
Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical
atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches
only, and bands, - like those long bright bands of cloud that trail across the
landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapor you
still can find Horai - but not else-where... . Remember that Horai is also
called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage, - the Vision is the Intangible. And
the Vision is fading, - never again to appear save in pictures and poems and
dreams.
(Kwaidan 178)
Reading this passage, Noguchi detects Heam’s critique. He says:
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Indeed he had the most lovely incense of love with Old Japan which he had
to protect from the evil winds; and he was afraid that the magical
atmosphere of his vision might be disturbed. His only desire was to be left
alone with the dreams of his Horai; and the dreams themselves were ghosts,
under whose spell he wove the silvery threads of the Ideal, and wrote the
books with a strange thrill which nobody else could ever feel.
{Hearn in Japan 7, My Emphasis)
In is interesting that Hearn admits that his magical land is a mirage; that is, his
vision of “Old Japan” may be simply a vision. What is important for Hearn is what
the vision, however temporary and illusory, is able to evoke, what it makes us
remember and aspire to. It seems that Hearn, on a personal level, found this
memory of what was lost in Japan. It reminded him of the world that was taken
from him, of the Greece of his mother that he always longed for (Dawson 147-
148).
But performatively speaking, Heam’s writings on “Old Japan” do more than
satisfy his personal longings for escape from the present and “return to the mother.”
Whether Hearn intended this or not, as I would like to consider, he is participating
in a project intended to subvert certain currents in modern Japanese life. That is to
say, as Heam notes, the ’’vision is fading,” and “the evil winds from the West” may
be to blame. Susan Napier has argued in her 1996 book, The Fantastic in Modern
Japanese Literature, that Japanese writers from the modern period have often times
used literature of a mythic or fantastical nature as a concerted strategy intended to
address and, in some cases, subvert the modernization they were witnessing during
Meiji and Taisho Japan (12-13). Thus, this ability to read Heam as Japanese, as
Koizumi Yakumo, not only renders the essentialized binaries of East and West into
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a state of crisis, but by adopting this more fluid conception of canon and reading
Heam’s work as a part of Japanese literature - as Noguchi does - then Heam’s
immense body of folk and ghost tales can be seen as a contribution to this effort: to
subvert modernity by a return to a vision of the world that is rapidly fading. In
other words, Heam’s writings, above all, lament the homogenizing forces of
modernity and the resulting disappearance of an almost “magical” mode of life, of
world where there is no more “diversity,” in Segalen’s sense. As such, Heam seems
to respond to his own call to recuperate the site of “the exotic” with his immense
body of output. The reemergence of “Horai,” after all, can only come through the
“pictures and poems and dreams.” Therefore, he, and with great help from his wife
Setsu, engaged in a recovery project of sorts, attempting “protect Old Japan,” to
record and re-vitalize tales before the Japan they signified was gone forever. To be
sure, this revelation in no way should lead us to believe that Heam may not have
done harm to Japan with his particular brand of Orientalism; but considering the
amount of time he spent there and the degree to which he invested himself in the
world around him through his writings, we must also understand that he contributed
much to life in Japan as well.
Noguchi: The “Dual Citizen”
For Noguchi, his journey across the Pacific had a more personal and painful
effect. Upon his return to Japan, it took the poet some time to readjust to life in his
country of birth. And his contemporaries did not make things easy for him either.
As Masayo Duus notes, Noguchi’s attempts to reengage Japanese society were met
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86
with resistance and scorn by other writers (37). Noguchi, after all, never had
established himself as a writer before leaving for the United States. He was only
known to his countrymen as a Japanese who had “made it” in America. As such, he
was treated with suspicion in Japan that resulted in a kind of “cultural hazing”
(Duus 37). That is to say, his time and success abroad resulted in a questioning by
some of the “authenticity” of his “Japaneseness,” both in terms of his inner
sentiment and even in regards to his physical characteristics. “To Japanese eyes,”
said poet Hagiwara Sakutaro, “his poetic sentiment is typically ‘un-Japanese’... his
handling of the subject, his expression of ideas, his use of poetic language, his
fundamental feelings are so unlike those of Japanese that one seems to be reading a
Westerner’s poems translated directly into our language.” (Qtd. in Duus, 37).
During Noguchi’s time away from Japan, the Japanese language - written in
particular - underwent a dramatic transformation known as the genbunichi
movement. In short, the movement sought to move written Japanese away from its
classical forms towards a “unification of speech and writting” - in other words, the
CO
colloquialization of literature. As a result, Noguchi, whose sentiments and literary
knowledge seemed to have stemmed from classical Japanese literature, struggled
greatly with modem Japanese writing; in fact, he didn’t publish a single poem in
Japanese until 17 years after his return (Duus 38). For these reasons, it seems he
was never embraced as Noguchi Yone the way he was as Yone Noguchi.
5 8 See Tomi Suzuki’s Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996) for a study on the genbunichi movement in Japanese
literature.
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87
It is difficult to discern the psychological effect this alienation from his
country and language had on Noguchi, personally. In this writings, however,
Noguchi did address the subject repeatedly. His performance o f multiple and
varying strategies will be the subject of my concluding remarks on Noguchi.
To counter his rejection by other Japanese, Noguchi used his English
writings to even the score. In his 1914 book, Through the Torii - a collection of
reflections on Japanese life and art - he notes in the final essay:
...if I fail to make me understood by the present Japanese, that might be
from the fact that they are less Japanese, or I am, in truth, more Japanese.
How remote they are, being "un-Japanese," from me as I hope to put myself
side by side with the old centuries (though I am not sure what century)...
(206-207)
As this passage demonstrates, Noguchi could respond to those who questioned his
“authenticity” by deconstructing theirs. Yet it is ironic that Noguchi had to write in
English to do so considering his earlier struggles with his adopted tongue.
Moreover, he had to distance himself from his contemporaries (who had clearly
rejected him) aligning himself, rather, with “old Japan.” It is almost as if Noguchi
had to remain in-between, floating in an interstitial space, speaking to an other place
in another language in order to feel a sense of himself. In other words, for these
moments, he was in-between, traversing through a Third Space, forever cut off
from “home” - at least as the world around him defined it - in order to find a place
where he could belong.
Noguchi reflects on his alienation from both countries, cultures and
languages in the poem, “Dual Citizen” (Nijukokusekisha):
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88
When Japanese read my Japanese poetry they say,
“His Japanese poems are not so good but perhaps his English poems
are better.”
When Westerners read my English poetry, they say,
“I can’t bear to read his English poems, but his Japanese poems must
be superb.”
To tell the truth,
I have no confidence in either language.
In other words, I guess I am a dual citizen.
(Qtd. in Duus 37)5 9
Azuma has noted that the Japanese in America, by strategizing ways to claim
belonging in both Japan and America, took great pains to negotiate their identity
without disrupting the national integrity of either nation (14). Perhaps Noguchi is
attempting to do that here as well. Nonetheless, it is interesting that Noguchi
explains his sense of belonging in negative terms; it his rejection by both countries
that prompts his sense of citizenry. Or lack thereof. In other words, his trope of a
“dual citizen” is problematized by the fact that neither seems to accept him, as he
himself painfully admits. If we recall Traubel’s 1911 remarks on the relationship
between Noguchi and Heam, he noted that Noguchi “was here too long to ever get
us out of himself again. He can never recede into his nativity. When he writes he
sounds both sides of the globe.” Noguchi’s son, Isamu, as well, made similar
remarks about his father, saying: “I would say that my father...wanted to find his
own way. Only when he returned to Japan and tried to become Japanese did he fail,
for he was no longer Japanese” (Poetry 44). Hence, I would like to suggest that
Noguchi was in fact - whether consciously or not - experimenting with a different
5 9 Due to the scarcity of this work, I have not been able obtain a copy for this thesis.
Therefore, I have had to rely the version Duus cites.
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89
form of citizenry - neither Japanese nor American - apart from the two poles that
he desperately wanted to be a part of.
This may also be the case when Noguchi writes his book Japan and
America in 1921, in particular his chapter, “Literary Co-operation between America
and Japan.” Although much of the book - written as a result of a lecture tour he
gave in America - is highly ingratiating towards his American audience, and while
in many of the chapters, in particular those dealing with more material realities
such as “Japan To-Day” and the “Postscript,” Noguchi leaves the East-West binary
relatively unproblematized, his chapter on his vision for trans-Pacific literary
interaction is a noteworthy exception. In it, Noguchi reflects upon the course of
English Letters and American history and argues for greater contact between
America and Japan’s writers. The reason he provides, interestingly, anticipates
Palumbo-Liu’s argument on the implications of America’s westward expansion
(although they are through terms intended to flatter his readers). He writes:
...the American civilasation (sic) and literature is slowly but steadily
moving Westward; and who will doubt that they are destined in time to
reach the Pacific Coast where, to use Miller’s words60, the “brave young
city of the Balboa seas” is working out her own life’s mission ?
{Japan and America 44)
But Noguchi senses no danger in this. Why? Because when American literature
reaches the Pacific, he hopes Japan’s literature will be there to meet it. He
6 0 Noguchi is quoting from the famous recluse-poet Joaquin Miller, who was Noguchi’s
friend and mentor during his days in California.
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90
continues, “Then it is the time when the real literary co-operation between America
and Japan will be acting” (Japan and America 46).
What Noguchi argues for is a fascinating and possibly unprecedented
movement in world literature. In short, it is for a Literature of the Pacific. He uses
the figures of two mountains, Japan’s Mt. Fuji and California’s Mt. Shasta, for his
bearings. He writes:
The million miles of blue waves of the Pacific Ocean are guarded by those
two awe-inspiring but kind mountains, awe-inspiring like kings, kind like
queens, Fuji Mountain in Japan and Mount Shasta in California, whose
white-crowned heads reach the sky and exchange a salutation of voiceless
words with God. While the Tokaiko highway concentrates its natural beauty
with Fuji Mountain as a centre, here the scenic wonder of California is
begun with Mount Shasta... [sic]
(Japan and America 46-47)
Only those who wrote from the western coast of America, Noguchi believes, would
be able to participate in this project. East coast writing, with its connections to the
Old World of Europe, too often retains the trace of rationalism that Noguchi is
critical of (Japan and America 42). Why then would the west coast serve as the
home for a literature that could enact a “true blending life and nature” (Japan and
America 42)? What connection would Japanese writers have to this? The reason:
the natural beauty of both Japan and America’s West coast terrain are both perfect
for writers who deal with the natural world in their work. Furthermore, this
emphasis on nature also would allow Japan’s writers to substantially “bring
something to the table,” so to speak; as Noguchi perceived it, Japan’s traditional
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91
aesthetics, its love of natural beauty would allow its artists to influence American
writers just as the West had influenced Japan. He writes awkwardly:
It is the attitude of us Japanese towards nature that we, from a sense of
solidarity of the universe, seek first where is the true affinity between man
and nature; by passing out into nature of the non-human world, we can
forget our belittling self-aggrandisement (sic) or egoism, and then our true
place in the universe will be revealed.
(Japan and America 49)
Thus, the two mountains, Shasta and Fuji - as symbols of the beauty of both lands
- would serve as source and guardians of this new literature that would celebrate
and affirm humanity’s relation to a more natural life. He concludes that by adopting
this attitude through interaction with Japan, America’s literature could realize itself:
“We dare say the we Orientals can contribute some new poetical strength to the
Pacific Coast to make her the new centre (sic) of America, when the opportunity
smiles” (Japan and America 50).
Although Noguchi may be attempting to speak as “a Japanese,” and
therefore is intentionally seeking to negotiate a sense of parity between Japan and
America, I would like to suggest that he is inadvertently calling for a sensibility and
culture that could be an altenative to these national and racial polarities. After all,
considering what we have explored, including the ambivalence that Noguchi
displayed in his writings towards the “East/West” binary, towards American racism
and the English language, and most of all towards his alienation from Japan as
expressed by his contemporaries, is it possible to say that his identity is ever a
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92
stable, empowered one? In spite of how hard he tries, does Noguchi succeed in
“being Japanese” and speaking for Japan?
As I would like to suggest, Noguchi’s literary movement could in fact take
place in a separate space; that is to say, in order to be successful, both writers from
Japan and the American West would have to move and meet in a partnership
somewhere in between; both would have to change in order for this Pan-pacific
movement to create literature that would separate both Japan and America’s West
from the rest of the world. Moreover, the “egoism” that Noguchi critiques could
just as easily be a reference to identity as well. It is possible that Noguchi is
suggesting that through a greater communion with Nature, the limits of identity, of
self-aggrandizement, could be put into perspective. Thus, Noguchi, like Hearn, in
these brief moments and perhaps on an unconscious level, seems to be attempting
to negotiate beyond the terms that the world has provided him, and uses art in order
to so61.
Hybrid Subjects
Through an attention to the heterogeneity and ambivalence that I detect in
the writings of both Hearn and Noguchi, as well as from the fleeting moments
where they posit new orientations for some of the most crippling binaries of their
times, I have tried to suggest new ways in which we might understand these
6 1 It should be noted that Noguchi, when calling for this new literature, is speaking only of
the participation of Japan and America. Nowhere does he address the other countries of the
Pacific Rim, specifically other Asian countries. Therefore, although the movement that he
calls for is certainly interesting and unique, it has definite limitations that we must remain
aware of.
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93
• fZ)
important writers. Doubtless, there are more. I believe, however, that it is clear
that their writings, whether it be Hearn’s re-working of legends and lore, or
Noguchi’s treatises on Japanese art, both subjects too often examined simply as
aesthetic, apolitical production, must be seen as having numerous worldly, material
connections as well. Ultimately then, perhaps we can now begin to explore ways in
which the aesthetic and worldly interpretations of both men, and even art and
politics in general, can be seen as compatible with one another rather than mutually
opposed.
At the same time, it is also clear that these two men were at their best when
it was specifically art and literature that they dealt with; only then could they even
attempt to make sense of the turbulent world around them. In other words, all too
often, when dealing directly with the material and political, the more problematic
aspects of their thought - including Heam’s Orientalism and Noguchi desperate
nationalist desires - come to the fore. That picture of Heam and Noguchi is equally
strong. For such reasons, perhaps we can begin to think of both writers through the
process of “hybridity” that Bhabha identifies in colonial contexts or in relationships
of power. The hybrid figure, he argues, is significant in that it signals both the
“productivity of colonial power” as well as “strategies of [its] subversion” through
6 2 Due to limits of length and time, I regret that I have been unable to give more
consideration to Noguchi’s writings in Japanese. Not only does this includes the
aforementioned “war-time literature,” but also Noguchi’s poetry, criticism as well as his
reflections on his life abroad that he wrote during his later years. As I have said, I hope to
undertake this project at a later time in a longer work. For some of his Japanese works, see
selections of his works in Gendai Nihon no Bungaku Zenshu Vol. 73 (Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobo 1956) and Noguchi Yonejiro Senshu, Vol. 1-3 (Tokyo: Kuresu Shuppan 1998).
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94
“the ambivalent space” of cultural production (Bhabhal59-160). In other words,
the emergence of hybridity, on one hand, is a symptom that particular hegemonies
are, in fact, working and exerting a degree of control over the subjects they seek to
dominate. On the other hand, and at the same time, the hybrid, due to its inherent
ambiguity, threatens the integrity of a particular hegemonic act or discourse by
“turning the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power” (160). Bhabha
continues:
If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production o f hybridization
rather than the noisy command of colonist authority or the silent repression
of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs. The
ambivalence at the source of traditional discourse on authority enables a
form of subversion, founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive
conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention.
(160)
An attention to hybridity, therefore, may enable a conceptual reconfiguration of
power beyond the traditional and sometimes too simplistic binaries of oppressor
and oppressed, and Orientalist and Orientalized, by shedding light on the
subversive strategies suggested by the ambivalence of hybrid figures.
In relation to Noguchi and Hearn, the notion of hybridity allows us both to
begin to theorize and historicize their writings. In other words, both their writings
attest to the power of Orientalism and its affects on how Japan and Asia was
perceived and dealt with. In addition, and as I have argued, their writings show the
potency of the “nation” during the era in which they lived. At the same time,
whether it was through Noguchi’s conscious and unconscious critiques of racism
(including his own racism) as well as his reflections on his alienation from Japan
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95
and America, or Hearn’s colonial anxiety and subsequent questioning of his own
positionality as a Western, both men, although it was only in brief moments,
explored new, hybrid modes of being, of ways of living in-between that were in
many ways unique to their time. As a result, perhaps we should attempt to embrace
Heam and Noguchi for the ways in which they are both problematic and
progressive - tom between the world they were a part of and the world that they
subconsciously may have wanted to live in. Perhaps then we can appreciate their
importance not so much for what they concluded, but for what they struggled with
- indeed, that they stmggled at all in a time when so few did. In doing so, we can
begin to see how both Noguchi and Heam are significant writers that help us
understand the U.S.-Japan divide in its early years as well as the emergence of
modernity in the Pacific.
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96
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Negotiations of the transPacific, United States-Japan divide in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn and Yone Noguchi
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East Asian Languages and Cultures
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