With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic. Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested, looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient art, which had been brought to Japan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in Japan. He describes his landlord, the old sake-brewer, coming to definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,—you ought to have been a girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his father about pretty girls,—what shall I do with him? Marry him at seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."
He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century false,—everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese.
After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was dedicated:—
TOKYO
"to my friend
Amenomori Nobushige
poet, scholar and patriot."
We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the approach of a man's fiftieth year—perhaps the only land to find the new sensation is in the Past,—floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to feel the charm of the Far East—or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality? Alas! I don't know...."
Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese, however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own world, as far from this one as the star Rephan.
Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle.
In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she mentions McDonald of Yokohama—in brown boots and corduroys—as escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald in one of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain.