Lafcadio Hearn: Matsue, Kumamoto and Yaizu

Hearn began teaching in Matsue in 1890, and from his window he saw the green citadel with its grim, grotesquely peaked castle. He recorded its legend. A girl, whose name was never recorded, was buried at the walls as a sacrifice; she loved dancing, so a law forbade any girl to dance in the streets of Matsue, because when one did, the hill and the castle shook. The keep was finished in 1611 and, with its attached turret, survived the 1875 demolitions. It is now a national treasure.

訪問のヒント: Matsue Castle stands in the old castle town; its original wooden keep is the main sight.

Hearn moved into a one-storey samurai house beside the castle moat, behind a long, high tiled wall. He lived here as a newlywed with his wife Setsu from May 1891. In Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan he counts fourteen rooms, lofty, spacious and beautiful. Though he stayed only until November, he was nostalgic for the house and wrote about it in several books. It is a National Historic Site, and the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum next door holds about 1,500 items, including his belongings and writings.

訪問のヒント: The house and the museum stand side by side among the samurai residences along the castle moat.

Hearn travelled west in July 1891 to Kitzuki, now known as Izumo Taisha, and wrote journal entries there, the first dated 20 July. He called it Kitzuki, founded by the ancient gods, and described the Tenjin-Matsuri, the festival of the Divine Scribe. Kizuki is one of the shrine's old names. An old record describes it as the highest building of its time, about 48 metres tall.

訪問のヒント: Izumo Taisha is a working shrine in Izumo; visit with the respect due to a place of worship.

Hearn taught in Kumamoto from late 1891 and spent three years there. His book Kokoro opens at a railway station in the city, in the sixth month of the twenty-sixth year of Meiji. A telegram has announced that a prisoner will be brought to Kumamoto by train for trial. The crowd waits, pressing forward but silent, as he is pushed through the wicket. Then an officer calls: "Sugihara San! Sugihara O-Kibi! is she present?"

場所の精度: Hearn does not name the station, so the pin marks today's Kumamoto Station.

Hearn began residing in Yaizu in 1897. In his essay At Yaidzu he calls it the old fishing-town of Yaidzu, grey as the rough coast it rests on and sheltered from heavy seas by an extraordinary rampart of boulders. Looking out from the sea wall, he sees the glorious spectre of Fuji. The fishing boats on the stone slope are of a form peculiar to the place. A small Hearn museum opened in Yaizu in 2007.

場所の精度: The essay describes the whole town and its sea wall; the pin marks Yaizu in general.

Kwaidan, published in 1904, includes the tale of Hōïchi, a blind man of Akamagaséki famed for reciting the history of the Heike and the Genji. The Dan-no-ura battle, the last of the long contest between the two clans, is his subject. Today Akama Shrine in Shimonoseki honours the child Emperor Antoku, who died in 1185. Its Hoichi Hall holds a statue of Hoichi the Earless, and seven mounds in the grounds represent Heike warriors.

訪問のヒント: Akama Shrine is a working shrine in Shimonoseki; the statue of Hoichi stands in its Hoichi Hall.