On the other hand it strikes me that in another twenty years, or perhaps thirty, after a brief artificial expansion, all the ports will shrink. The foreign commerce will be all reduced to agencies. A system of small persecutions will be inaugurated and maintained to drive away all the foreigners who can be driven away. After the war there will be a strong anti-foreign reaction—outrages—police-repressions—temporary stillness and peace: then a new crusade. Life will be made wretched for Occidentals—in business—just as it is being made in the schools—by all sorts of little tricky plans which cannot be brought under law-provisions, or even so defined as to appear to justify resentment—tricks at which the Japanese are as elaborately ingenious as they are in matters of etiquette and forms of other kinds. The nation will show its ugly side to us—after a manner unexpected, but irresistible.
The future looks worse than black. As for me, I am in a perpetual quandary. I suppose I’ll have to travel West,—and console myself with the hope of visiting Japan at long intervals.
Well, there’s no use in worrying—one must face the music,
I am sorry your eyes are weak, too. What the devil of a trouble physical trouble is!—a dead weight check on will! Still, you have good luck in other ways, and after all, eye-trouble is only a warning in both our cases.
Ever truly,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Kōbe, February, 1895.
Dear Chamberlain,—I had mailed you the American letter before your own most kind enclosure came, with the note from Makino. Of course this is beyond thanks,—and I can’t say very much about it. Since then I received from you also Lowell’s six papers on Mars,—which I have read, and return by this mail,—and your friendly lines from Atami.
Just as you suggested in the Atami letter, I was feeling about matters. There would be special conditions in New Orleans, on the paper of which I was ten years a staff-writer. I should have to work only a couple of hours a day in my own room, and would have opportunities of money-making and travel. There are risks, too,—yellow fever, lawlessness, and personal enemies. But to leave Japan now would, of course, be like tearing one’s self in two,—and I am not sure but the ultimate nervous result would destroy my capacity for literary work. The best thing, I imagine, will be to ask my friend to keep the gate open for me, in case I have to go. The great thing for me is not to worry: worry and literary work will not harmonize. The work always betrays the strain afterward.