Lafcadio Hearn: The Foreign Correspondent As Double Agent

2025-05-16 03:08:48

(MENAFN- Asia Times) This is a story of how, a century and a quarter ago in Japan, a remarkable Anglo-Irish-Greek foreign correspondent called Lafcadio Hearn pulled off an unusual feat: He became admired not only by the readers he was writing for in America and Europe, who knew little about Japan, but also by the Japanese themselves, who knew rather a lot.

He is no longer well known in Europe or America, except among specialists, but in Japan he remains an object of study, of admiration and even, for some, of veneration. How many foreign correspondents have museums dedicated to them in the countries about which they were writing?

This is even more surprising than it may sound. The best foreign correspondents often end up annoying or at least irritating their hosts. After all, their job is to report what is going on, warts and all, and few governments or elites like the warts to be pointed out.

Very often, foreign correspondents are the hardest reporters for governments to influence or bully, except by kicking them out altogether, but when that is done their writing either ceases or becomes less well-informed. That is what has been happening in recent years as foreign reporters have been pushed out of China, many of them moving to Taipei or Singapore.

Foreign correspondents, if they stay a long time in the countries they are sent to and really get to know their hosts well, tend to earn the suspicion of their editors back home who worry that they may“go native.” The fear is that their correspondent might become uncritical and cease to spot new stories. Plenty of excellent, long-standing correspondents have proved this fear unfounded.

Walter Duranty. Photo: Ukrainian World Congress

Nonetheless, perhaps the most notorious case of a correspondent who did go native is Walter Duranty, a Briton who was the New York Times's man in Moscow under Stalin, who won Pulitzer prizes for his coverage, and yet infamously dismissed reports of famine in Ukraine as nonsense. In the 2019 movie, “Mr Jones” , about the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who did uncover the Holomodor, Duranty is depicted as a debauchee, even as a double agent.

Moreover, in stable times, which in the news business means dull ones, another danger looms: foreign correspondents often find themselves looking for strange and unusual tales, for those are the sort of stories most likely to interest their bosses back home and to entertain the reader or viewer.

Few host countries, however, like to be turned into freak shows in which the exotic becomes central to their apparent identity. And the farther away and less well-known the country is, the likelier that the freak-show treatment will be a common resort among foreign writers trying desperately to make a living.

This is not meant to denigrate the foreign correspondent, which this author would never do – having served as one in both Brussels and Tokyo and having, as editor-in-chief of The Economist, benefited from the work of many fine practitioners of that craft.

Rather, the temptation to focus on the odd is – to state an awkward reality – one that is particularly true for Japan and one that only well-informed and careful news editors back home can steer their correspondents away from. This is partly because Japan is a country replete with exotic stories – exotic at least from European and American points of view. But it is also because the quite conformist, don't-rock-the-boat culture of Japan tends to mitigate against a lively news agenda, boosting the incentive to seek out the colorful.

The exoticiser who went native

The Japan to which Lafcadio Hearn arrived by ship in 1890 from the United States, where he had been working as a journalist and author in Cincinnati and New Orleans, was of course a place very different from the country we know today. After two centuries of self-imposed isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan had in 1853 reluctantly opened up to European and American trade, technology and diplomacy and then suffered two turbulent, violent decades of civil war and disorder.

With the restoration of the Japanese emperor at the helm of government in 1868 in a coup d'etat and the establishment in 1889 of a new constitution with the country's first ever parliament, albeit elected by a limited franchise, the country that greeted Hearn was also embarked on an urgent, determined strategy of modernization and Westernization, so as to heal domestic divisions and to stave off foreign threats.

But to Westerners it was also wonderfully exotic, with an influx of Japan's art and design to Europe bringing about the late 19^th century fad of Japonisme. You need only to watch Gilbert & Sullivan's 1885 comic opera,“The Mikado,” to see how Japanese images could even then be translated and distorted in popular culture back home.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece in 1850 as the son of a Greek mother and Anglo-Irish father, whose marriage was later annulled – and then both parents in effect deserted him, leaving Lafcadio to be raised by relatives in Ireland and schooled in England.

All that made him, arguably, a classic product of the British empire, albeit at the poor end of the range: somewhat stateless, with a mixed, perhaps confused, identity, but also able to make his way in the great country of stateless migrants of the era, the United States.

MENAFN16052025000159011032ID1109559637

Legal Disclaimer:
MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.