Lafcadio Koizumi

Than Japan and Greece not even Liberia and Labrador would appear to have less in common. Yet one day last week several smiling members of the Japanese Legation in Athens joined several swart Greek Cabinet Ministers on a little steamer and rolled out to the Ionian island of Leucadia (Santa Maura) to honor a common pride: the late exotic Lafcadio Hearn.

The Irish Free State. New York and New Orleans might appropriately have joined the celebration. Self-named in honor of his birthplace, Lafcadio Hearn was the son of a Greek woman and an Irish surgeon-major stationed on the island during the British occupation that followed Waterloo. After indefinite schooling at a Roman Catholic College in Great Britain he went to the U. S., worked as a waiter in New York, then moved to Cincinnati where State laws prevented his marrying his octoroon mistress. Next move was to New Orleans where he worked on the Times Democrat, wrote the sketches of Creole life that first brought him wide attention.

In 1890, Greek-Irish-American Lafcadio Hearn went to Japan to promote trans-Pacific travel for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. He was fascinated by the country and the life, took a Japanese wife, Setsuko Koizumi, daughter of a Samurai. So that he could more easily become a Japanese citizen, he was adopted by Setsuko's family, changed his name to Yakumo (Eight Clouds) Koizumi and later turned Buddhist. He got a job as Professor of English Literature in Tokyo's Imperial University. At that time Western popular knowledge of Japan was still very Gilbert & Sullivan. Lafcadio Hearn took the real Japan to the English-speaking world just as a neurotic French naval officer named Louis Marie Julien Viaud (Pierre Loti) was taking it to France.

In Tokyo on Sept. 26, 1904 Yakumo Koizumi died, leaving four children, three of whom still live in his house. An invalid for several years before his death, he had been blind in one eye since he was 16, was painfully nearsighted in the other. As his sight failed he developed a hyper-acute sense of smell. It was Lafcadio Hearn's boast that he could smell the difference between a brunette and a blonde.

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