Japanese Koizumi Yakumo
born June 27, 1850, Levkás, Ionian Islands, Greece
died Sept. 26, 1904, Ōkubo, Japan
Irish-U.S.-Japanese writer, translator, and teacher.
He immigrated to the U.S. at age 19 and worked as a reporter and translator, writing on a wide range of subjects. In 1890 he traveled as a magazine writer to Japan, where he soon became a teacher, took a Japanese wife and name, and became a Japanese subject. Articles and books about Japan's customs, religion, and literature followed, including Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), and A Japanese Miscellany (1901); Kwaidan (1904) is a collection of supernatural stories and haiku translations. It was Hearn who, perhaps more than any other single person, introduced the broad culture of Japan to the West.