A photograph of Basil Hall Chamberlain.

Basil Hall Chamberlain

Basil Hall Chamberlain was born in 1850, in Southsea in the naval port of Portsmouth. The Chamberlain family was a prestigious family with ties to the Royal Navy; his father was a rear admiral in the Navy and his mother was also from an old-established family. His maternal grandfather was Captain Basil Hall, a naval captain known for his surveys of the coasts of Korea and the Ryukyu Islands. At the age of eight, his mother died, and he and his two younger brothers were raised by their grandmother in Versailles, where they attended high school (lycée). At the age of 17, he spent a year in Spain, but due to his physical ailments, he decided not to go to university. He resigned from a bank where he had been working, and spent about 3 years in Malta and other parts of Europe. He came to Japan in May 1873 (Meiji 6) at the age of 22, and the next year he was taken on as a tutor in the Japanese Naval Academy, teaching English and mathematics while publishing a series of studies on Japanese poetry and grammar in The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. He published The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (1880), “A Translation of the ‘Ko-ji-ki’, or Records of Ancient Matters” (1882) and other works. In 1886, he began lecturing on Japanese linguistics and philology at Tokyo Imperial University, where he also began research on the Ainu people and the Ryukyu Islands, making a major contribution to Japanese linguistics. In addition to his professional papers, he left behind A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (co-written with W. B. Mason; seven editions were published from 1891 to 1913). In 1911, he left Japan to live out the rest of his life on the shores of Lake Geneva, where he died in 1935 at the age of 85. In his later years he wrote …encore est vive la Souris (1933). One of his younger brothers, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was a pro-German who preached the superiority of the Germanic race in Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899) and the English edition of the same book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1911).

When Basil Chamberlain received as a gift from Lafcadio Hearn a copy of Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, the first work he wrote in Japan, Chamberlain was already Emeritus Professor of Japanese and Philology in the Imperial University of Tokyo, and already a major figure in Japanese studies. They were the same age except Hearn had arrived in Japan at the age of forty and Chamberlain’s advice to him then had been: “Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible. […] they are evanescent, you know; they will never come to you again, once they have faded out; and yet of all the strange sensations you may receive in this country you will feel none so charming as these.” Hearn makes use of this quotation early in his narrative, making us smile, as it reminds us how both men shared a fascination with the scenery of this distant Eastern country and chose to spend their days there.

Chamberlain not only laid the foundation for national linguistics in Japan, but also prided himself on his broad knowledge of Japanese culture, which is clearly evident in Things Japanese. Chamberlain stated in his Introductory Chapter that he is often asked questions about Japan, so he compiled his responses into “a guide-book to subjects.” This book has a broad scope. For foreigners who are interested in Japan, the selected topics vary widely, including Japanese history, geography, religion, literature, arts, industry, botany and zoology, customs and manners (such as ohaguro [tooth blackening] and tattooing), daily necessities (such as fans, towels, and pipes), and the biographies of Adams, Perry, and other famous people. It is a compact encyclopedia of Japan; Chamberlain arranges these and other articles in alphabetical order, and makes sure that the book is not too long, in accordance with his theory that “the book must not become too bulky, and above all things, not dull. That would kill it” (More Letters from Basil Hall Chamberlain to Lafcadio Hearn and letters from M. Toyama, Y. Tsubouchi and others, Hokuseido Press, 1937, p. 38).

From the first edition in 1890 to the sixth edition in 1929, the book underwent revisions, but its empirical and concrete approach lives up to the self-evidence of its title, Things Japanese. Chamberlain’s basic stance remained the same: that “true appreciation is always critical as well as kindly.” His writing style, which maintains a certain distance from his subjects and is sometimes mixed with sarcasm, is typical of British intellectuals.

First, in the Introductory Chapter, Chamberlain states, “Old Japan is dead,” and Things Japanese is intended to be “the epitaph” recording the many virtues of the deceased and his frailties. On the other hand, he also reveals his view that, despite “the modern Japanese upheaval,” “more of the past has been retained than has been let go,” and “the national character persists intact.”

Thanks to this practical Englishman who examined, organized, and recorded one-by-one the old and new things that coexisted in Japan at the time of its rapid Europeanization, readers of this book today are able to glimpse the life of the Japanese during the Meiji era, which is now long gone. In the article “Dress,” for example, he describes in detail the clothing of men and women, from underwear to formal wear, and then adds the following comments: A Japanese lady’s dress will often represent a value of 200 yen [“400 yen” in the Japanese edition], without counting the ornaments for her hair, worth perhaps as much again; A gentleman will rarely spend on his clothes as much as he lets his wife spend on hers. Perhaps he may not have on more than 60 yen’s worth [“100 to 150 yen’s worth” in the Japanese edition]. Examples of such realistic observations are too numerous to count.

Chamberlain’s academic knowledge as a scholar is of course also on full display in the articles on “Writing” (Japanese characters), “Ainos” (Ainu), and “Luchu” (Ryukyu), among others. It can be said that articles like “Books on Japan” and “Characteristics of the Japanese People,” which cleverly introduce foreign scholars’ views of Japan and the Japanese at the time were nonetheless still written by Chamberlain, a self-proclaimed leader in the academic world, making this book worthy of being read as an authoritative source of information.

Things Japanese also has enough to satisfy the modern Japanese reader with a curiosity for the miscellaneous. Hard-to-classify articles such as “English as she is Japped,” “Pidgin-Japanese,” and “Topsy-turvydom” are just a few of them. The book as a whole is a treasury of miscellaneous information, in the best sense of the word. One of the interesting articles in the book is “Fashionable Crazes,” which covers a series of phenomena that had become popular after Chamberlain’s arrival. The article begins with the sentences, “Japan stood still so long that she has now to move quickly and often, to make up for lost time. Every few years there is a new craze, over which the nation, or at least that part of the nation which resides in Tōkyō, goes wild for a season,” and ends with a note on the bird-keeping craze, which was seen in from 1926 to 1927. Sixty years later, has Japan been able to make up for lost time? It would be interesting to read the book to see whether Chamberlain’s short comments about Japan and the Japanese people are still relevant today. This is a book that offers a wide variety of reading possibilities and never ceases to fascinate.

However, when reading Things Japanese, we cannot help but be surprised at how strongly eurocentric Chamberlain’s criteria for evaluating Japan are. Chamberlain’s is perhaps the most remarkable and strongest characteristic in this entire book.

The “Food” article, in which he declares that “Japanese dishes fail to satisfy European cravings” enumerating items that are not on the table,: “a diet without meat, without milk, without bread, without butter ….” It is, after all, a matter of personal opinion and taste all too common in the conservative realm, and, therefore, by its very nature, the article does not offend.

However, many people today, Japanese or not, may find Chamberlain’s critique of Japanese culture perplexing. For example, according to him “much of that which the Japanese themselves prize most highly in their literature seems intolerably flat and insipid to the European taste (Literature)”; “the effect of Japanese music is, not to soothe, but to exasperate beyond all endurance the European breast (Music)”; “If Japan has given us no music, so also has she given us no immortal verse (Literature)”; “Nor can any one fully realise how picturesque our European languages are, how saturated with metaphor and lit up with fancy, until he has familiarised himself with one of the tamer tongues of the Far East (Language).”

Chamberlain considered Japanese literature, art, music, and architecture as small “compared to Europe,” lacking in breadth, depth, and size. He thought that the Japanese imagination, thought, and intellect that produced them all paled in comparison to those of Europe. Things Japanese, while styled as a compact encyclopedia, is not merely a guide to Japan, but the compilation of Chamberlain’s many years of research on Japan. It is underpinned by his Western supremacist principles, and the conclusions he reaches are expressed in unambiguously throughout the book.

The reason why Things Japanese, with such characteristics, went through many editions and was translated into German and French and widely read in Western Europe at the time was due to the Westerners’ growing interest in Japan, a new power that was then emerging in the international community. There is no denying that there was satisfaction gained from Chamberlain’s judgment that this East Asian country, which was becoming militarily powerful, had little to offer in the way of culture. Nowadays, it is not unusual for people to turn to the East in search of what the West lacks, but it was not so long ago that the idea that “civilized” Western nations were superior to non-Western nations was common. In this sense, Things Japanese is truly a product of its time.

Chamberlain, who lived in Japan for 38 years and spoke fluent Japanese (including a knowledge of archaic words), was respected in the academic world where he trained many Japanese students. He gave Japanese people the impression of being a mild-mannered, pro-Japanese person, as is evident in his obituaries. On the other hand, Things Japanese also shows the spirit of an English scholar who was proud of his European cultural background and who never stopped measuring Japan against the splendor of his culture of origin.