Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn

Setsuko Koizumi (1868–1932) was the daughter of a Japanese samurai family in Matsué. In 1891 she married a foreigner — Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) — and their union lasted 13 years and produced three children. Hearn adopted her family name, becoming Koizumi Yakumo 小泉八雲,and spent those years in Japan writing, teaching, and achieving international recognition. Setsuko’s Reminiscences tells something of the couple’s moves and travels, but focuses mostly on the character, habits, and eccentricities of her husband. The book is a heartfelt and intimate portrait of a marriage that brought Lafcadio the home and family he had never before enjoyed. This book shares a charming story of domestic happiness, told by his closest companion, collaborator, and interpreter of life, death, and afterlife in Meiji Japan.

Introduction

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.

Coda

This concluding chapter reverses the perspective of the preceding chapters and explores travel writings of Meiji Japanese women who sailed to Victorian Britain. It focuses on the writings of three Japanese women—namely, Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko—with diverse backgrounds and purposes. It picks up testimonies of travelling women in Meiji Japan who encountered British people and culture and unveils cross-racial female intimacy and burgeoning transnational feminist alliance on the issues of women’s education and civil rights. It documents their connections with Victorian female educationists such as Dorothea Beale and Elizabeth Phillips Hughes and discovers a long-forgotten link between Isabella Bird and Meiji women’s education.

A Scientist in Love

Chapter 4 investigates Marie Stopes’s interracial, cross-gender relationships with Fujii Kenjirō and Sakurai Jōji through her three published Japanese-related works—A Journal from Japan (1910), Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911), and Plays of Old Japan: The ‘Nō’ (1913)—along with her unpublished transcripts and correspondence. It unveils an unconventional, stormy romance, a warm friendship, and literary collaboration. It considers the gender and racial complexities Stopes textually negotiated for the sake of her love and friendship against the rigid imperial ideology and the Victorian notion of femininity, which produced a distinct representation of humanized Japan as Britain’s masculine ally with feminine sensibility. It also discusses particular challenges Western women in a cross-racial relationship faced in Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. The close examination of this underexplored phase of Stopes’s career reveals the incipience of her sexology and complicates the posthumous, more controversial aspect of her as eugenicist.

Hospitable Friendship

Chapter 1 sets up the theoretical questions of female friendship across race, nationality, and gender. It establishes exclusivism in the philosophical discourses of friendship and hospitality and their political and ethical implications demonstrated by Jacques Derrida. It then discusses the practical challenges the three Victorian women travellers to Meiji Japan—Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes—pose to the male homosocial model of friendship with their praxis of friendship and hospitality through their writing. It highlights the aporias of male philosophical theorizations and addresses them with female literary representations of real-life instances of cultural exchange and congress in a non-Western context. Drawing on feminist theorizations of open subjectivity and affective relationality, it presents alternative models and paradigms of friendship, which the book terms hospitable friendship, and argues for particular political affordances of literature for cross-racial female solidarity.

A Literary Diplomat

Chapter 3 discusses Mary Crawford Fraser and her Japan-related literary works to highlight political affordances of literature for cross-cultural female friendship and solidarity. Fraser opened up her writing space to her Japanese friends and enabled her readers to hear their voices in her writings. It examines Fraser’s friendships with Japanese people in A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan (1898) and analyses the influence of these friendships on her fictional works. It brings to light the existence of a long-forgotten international reading society of women in Meiji Japan. It provides real-life examples of cross-racial, international female friendship, an underdeveloped resource in recent scholarship on Victorian travelogues. It demonstrates how Fraser mobilized literature as a safe space for a woman to carry out diplomatic tasks during the tumultuous period of treaty revision and the conclusion of Anglo-Japanese Alliance and strove to redress demeaning stereotypes of Japanese women.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan

Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship explores real-life instances and literary manifestations of cross-cultural friendship between Victorian female travellers and Meiji Japanese, examining its ethico-political significance against the backdrop of British ‘New Imperialism’. Shifting critical focus from the individualist model of subjectivity to affective relationality, Tomoe Kumojima conceptualizes the female travellers’ open subjectivity as hospitable friendship and argues that femininity proves to be an asset in their praxis of more equitable cross-cultural contact in non-colonial Japan. Political affordances of literature are the book’s overarching thread. Kumojima opens new archives of unpublished correspondence and typescripts and introduces contemporary Japanese literature hitherto unavailable in English, shedding a refreshing light on the works of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes. The book traverses the themes of identity fluidity, literary afterlife, international female solidarity, literary diplomacy, cross-racial heterosexual intimacy, and cross-gender friendship. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourses prompted by Britain’s colonial management, Japan’s successful modernization, the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship, and global geopolitics, demonstrating how the women travellers complicated and challenged Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries by creating counter-discourses through their literary activities. Kumojima also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji female pioneers in Britain and burgeoning transnational feminist alliances. The book addresses the absence of Japan in discussions of the British Empire in the field of literary studies and that of women and female agency in the male-dominated historiography of the Anglo-Japanese relationship.

Education and ‘Civilization’

Studies on the transformation of the Japanese educational system in the Meiji period usually emphasise the intensity of reforms and their comprehensive character. In the framework of the present study, I will briefly summarise the central aspects of this transformation, then turn to the examination of the tension manifested in Meiji period discourses on education. This is a tension that emerges when one compares the interpretation of the Meiji era as the introduction of ‘enlightened’ Western liberalism with the ideology of centralised reform, far from being as liberal as reported by Meiji period intellectuals themselves. I draw attention to this tension as manifested in the purposes of Meiji educational reforms, then I turn to the analysis of the education of women as a central question in terms of the interpretation of the family in Meiji Japan. The analysis is based on the writings of the leading intellectuals of the time, basically their essays published in the famous journal of the 1870s, Meiroku Zasshi 明六雑誌.