Lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Bisland

Elizabeth Bisland (1861-1929) was one of the first people to recognise Hearn’s talent.

Bisland was born on a plantation in Louisiana. In the winter of 1882, she read Hearn’s article called The Dead Wife, and decided to become a journalist. She joined the Times-Democrat, where Hearn was literary editor. Later, she moved to New York, where she worked as an editor and became a prominent reporter for publications including The Sun and Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1889, she raced around the world against a fellow female journalist, Nellie Bly, and actually arrived in Japan before Hearn. In 1891, she married a lawyer named Charles W. Wetmore. After Hearn’s death, she visited Japan three times, and was known as a Japanophile.

Her deep, lifelong friendship with Hearn is shown in their prolific correspondence. Hearn’s eldest son, Kazuo, wrote in Father Koizumi Yakumo (Koyama Shoten, 1954) “The friendship with Elizabeth Bisland could be said to be a kind of love. Not a blinding passionate kind of love, but a clear form of love, like the light of a firefly.” They maintained an ideal friendship, based on mutual intelligence, respect and empathy. Hearn dedicated his eighth work written in Japan, A Japanese Miscellany (Little Brown & Co., 1901), to Bisland.

Two years after Hearn’s death, Bisland collected the many letters Hearn had sent to his friends and acquaintances and published the two volumes of The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1906), and The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1910). She also supported his family.

In 1922, on her fourth trip to Japan, Bisland visited the former residence of Hearn in Matsue. She died in 1929, at the age of 67.

Bonner Fellers, an avid reader of Hearn’s works

Bonner Fellers (1896-1973) was a US army officer, and served as MacArthur’s confidant in Japan at the end of the war. He paved the way for the creation of the modern symbolic role of the Emperor.

Fellers was born in Ridge Farm, Illinois in the USA. He studied at the Quaker school, Earlham College, where he met a Japanese exchange student named Yuri Watanabe. She introduced him to the works of Hearn, and he read all of Hearn’s books devotedly. He shared Hearn’s understanding of Japanese culture, empathizing with the latter’s assertion that the ancestor worship of the Japanese was inseparable from Emperor worship. It is said that he proposed a new post-war system for Japan, which utilized the power of the Emperor within a democracy. In 2012, Fellers was a central character in the Hollywood film Emperor (directed by Peter Webber).

Fellers had been friends with the Koizumi family since before the war, and told Hearn’s wife, Setsu, that Hearn had taught him to love Japan. He became close friends with Hearn’s eldest son, Kazuo, and in the post-war turmoil, he searched for Hearn’s family, leading to a tearful reunion with Kazuo. Touched by the humanity of Fellers, Kazuo reminisced in Father Koizumi Yakumo. “Japan lost to America through war. It lost by science. Now, it has lost to Fellers’ humanity.”

After returning to the USA, Fellers continued to support Hearn’s family both spiritually and materially. He continued to correspond by letter even after the death of Kazuo in 1965. He worked to bring the book Re-echo (The Caxton Printers, 1957), written by Kazuo and Fellers’ daughter Nancy, to publication. He devoted his life to promoting Japanese-American friendship through his knowledge of Hearn. Bon Koizumi, the great-grandson of Lafcadio Hearn, is named after him. He was living in Washington DC when he died in 1973, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.