Great Interpreter of Yellow Peril: Lafcadio Hearn’s Contribution to the Yellow Man’s Burden

Abstract

　In January of 1894, six months before the Sino-Japanese war, Lafcadio Hearn delivered a lecture at Kumamoto, “The Future of the Far East,” in which he viewed the course of history as the struggle for survival against hunger, and the future will be to the Orientals if the Japanese and the Chinese co-operate with each other against the West. In spite of the fact that it was not specifically mentioned, this lecture was significantly based on Charles Henry Pearson's National Life and Character (1893), one of the prototype statements of yellow peril and the decline of the west. In this paper I will take up Hearn’s almost forgotten lecture, “the Future of the Far East” and Hearn’s mention of Pearson in the letters to Basil Hall Chamberlain. I will demonstrate how Hearn appropriated and transformed Pearson’s pessimistic prophecy into the optimistic ideas of the promising future of Japan, inspired from the contemporary reviews: the sturdiness of Chinese people and the potential for conflict between the white and coloured worlds from J. Llewelyn Davies’s “The Prospects ot the Civilised World” in Contemporary Review (June, 1893) and the universality of civilisation from Frederic Harrison’s “The Evolution of Our Race, A Reply” in Fortnightly Review (July, 1893). Hearn shared with Pearson the idea of the limitations of White colonisation in the tropics based on his experiences in the West Indies. He therefore considered the Chinese to be the coming race. While Pearson held pessimistic ideas about the intermixture of the Oriental ‘lower races’ and the West — higher races reduced to mediocrity through the operation of the law of entropy — Hearn, saw such changes as just a necessary transition in the cycle of civilisation. Although his lecture was not included in any of his books while he was alive and not circulated as much as his other writings, his idea, the optimistic view of the future of Japan, was intensified and disseminated through the Sino-Japanese war (1894-5) by the Japanese themselves, who were possibly influenced by Pearson as mediated through Hearn’s lecture.