In many ways, one of the saddest books on Japan is that subtitled Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation by Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn came to Japan in his middle age, liked the country and settled down there for the rest of his life. Eventually he adopted the country as his own and was naturalised as a Japanese. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that the Japanese Government then took the perfectly logical step of reducing his salary to the level of that paid to his Japanese colleagues.

There was much in Japanese manners, their mode of life, their way of thinking, their folk-lore, fables and fairy-tales, their religion, their artistic nature, their attitude towards the problems of life that fascinated Lafcadio Hearn. He proceeded to interpret all these things to the outside world in a series of works written in matchless prose. They present a picture of Japan that is true but to the stranger they are misleading because they show only a portion of the picture. Towards the end of his life Hearn seems to have realised this. His last book spells disillusionment. Side by side with all that he had found so beautiful is much that is ugly. Inside the outer layers that charm the eye is a harder core. His sympathy with the former had blinded his eyes to the latter but in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation he corrects, consciously or unconsciously, his earlier over-enthusiastic estimate of Japan and the Japanese.

The reader of this book will detect a more critical attitude developing as the book proceeds. The bulk of the matter was written at odd moments before 1939. My term in Tientsin, from November 1939 to February 1941, if it did not disillusion me, served to strengthen adverse opinions that had been forming in my mind for some years past. Since I am only writing reminiscences, I have left the earlier chapters substantially as I wrote them. They present a true picture of the impressions I formed at successive stages of my career and that is all that I claim for them.

A Japanese friend of mine once begged me to write a book about the Japanese people.