Diligent readers of The Atlantic during the 1890s had it on good authority that the Japanese mystique was no myth. For the better part of the decade the magazine ran a succession of lyrical dispatches written by a strange bird of an itinerant journalist who had fetched up in Japan at the age of forty and would never return. Today we can classify him as a writer of a familiar cosmopolitan stripe—the confirmed Japanophile, the devoted cultural interpreter bent on justifying the ways of the Eastern mind to his Western kinsmen. But to typecast him sells him short. Lafcadio Hearn was nothing if not the original model.
Edited because link no longer works. The Atlantic has gone pay subscription, FUCK.
. Look what China is doing for that dam at the three gorges area.... 
I visited the Lafcadio Hearn museum and his home awhile back, by the way. He taught English in a high school at first. I wonder how many other fucked English teachers there were back then. I doubt he was the only one. Anybody know? The museum didn't make any mentions of Hearn's disillusionment with Japan late in life.
