Basil Hall Chamberlain (18 October 1850 – 15 February 1935) was a
Britishacademic and
Japanologist. He was a professor of the
Japanese language at
Tokyo Imperial University and one of the foremost British
Japanologists active in Japan during the late 19th century. (Others included
Ernest Satow and
W. G. Aston.) He also wrote some of the earliest translations of
haiku into English. He is perhaps best remembered for his informal and popular one-volume encyclopedia Things Japanese, which first appeared in 1890 and which he revised several times thereafter. His interests were diverse, and his works include an anthology of poetry in French.[1]
Early life
Chamberlain was born in
Southsea (a part of
Portsmouth) on the south coast of
England, the son of an Admiral
William Charles Chamberlain and his wife Eliza Hall, the daughter of the travel writer
Basil Hall. His younger brother was
Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He was brought up speaking
French as well as
English, even before moving to
Versailles to live with his maternal grandmother in 1856 upon his mother's death. Once in
France, he acquired
German as well. Chamberlain had hoped to study at
Oxford, but instead started work at
Barings Bank in
London. He was unsuited to the work and soon had a
nervous breakdown. It was in the hope of a full recovery that he sailed out of
Britain, with no clear destination in mind.
Japan
Chamberlain landed in Japan on 29 May 1873, employed by the Japanese government as an o-yatoi gaikokujin. He taught at the
Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in
Tokyo from 1874 to 1882. His most important position, however, was as professor of
Japanese at
Tokyo Imperial University beginning in 1886. It was here that he gained his reputation as a student of Japanese language and literature. (He was also a pioneering scholar of the
Ainu and
Ryukyuan languages.) His many works include the first translation of the Kojiki into English (1882), A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese (1888), Things Japanese (1890), and A Practical Guide to the Study of Japanese Writing (1905).[2] A keen traveller despite chronic weak health, he cowrote (with
W. B. Mason) the 1891 edition of A Handbook for Travellers in Japan, of which revised editions followed.
Chamberlain was a friend of the writer
Lafcadio Hearn, once a colleague at the university, but the two became estranged over the years.[3]Percival Lowell dedicated his
travelogueNoto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891) to Chamberlain.[4]
He left Japan in 1911 and moved to
Geneva, where he lived until his death in 1935.
Selected works by Chamberlain
The Classical Poetry of the Japanese, 1880
"A Translation of the 'Ko-ji-ki', or Records of Ancient Matters" in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol. 10, Supplement, 1882
Rechaptered with notes by Charles Francis Horne in Horne, ed., The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East: With an Historical Survey and Descriptions, Vol. 1, 1917, pages 8–61.
The Language, Mythology, and Geographical Nomenclature of Japan Viewed in the Light of Aino Studies, 1887
A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, 1887
Aino Folk-Tales, 1888
Things Japanese, six editions 1890–1936
A paperback version of the fifth edition, from 1905, with the short bibliographies appended to many of its articles replaced by lists of other books put out by the new publisher, was issued by the
Charles E. Tuttle Company as Japanese Things in 1971 and has since been reprinted several times.
A Handbook for Travellers in Japan, co-written with W. B. Mason, seven editions 1891–1913 (numbered as third to ninth editions, the first and second editions being of its predecessor, A Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan by
Ernest Satow and A G S Hawes).
Essay in Aid of a Grammar and Dictionary of the Luchuan Language, 1895 (a pioneering study of the
Ryukyuan languages)
"Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram" in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol. 2, no. 30, 1902 (some of Chamberlain's translations from this article are included in Faubion Bowers' The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, Dover Publications, 1996
ISBN0-486-29274-6.)
Japanese Poetry, 1910
The Invention of a New Religion, 1912
At Project Gutenberg (incorporated into Things Japanese in 1927)
^Hearn, Lafcadio; Bisland, Elizabeth (1906).
The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, including the Japanese Letters. Vol. 1. Houghton, Mifflin and company. pp. 57–8. The second point was his attitude toward his friends — his quondam friends — all of whom he gradually dropped, with but few exceptions... (quoted from Chamberlain's letters). Chamberlain wrote to Hearn's biographer to explain that Hearn never lost his esteem, and he wrote a few times to Hearn, who had moved away to
Matsue, Shimane, but the letters went unanswered.
^ From the dedication. Lowell, Percival (1891).
Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press; printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. Retrieved 8 November 2011.
Further reading
Hirakawa, Sukehiro. "Changing Appreciations of Japanese Literature: Basil Hall Chamberlain versus Arthur Waley: Keynote speech given at the First SSAAPS Asia-Pacific Annual Conference, Goteborg, September 26, 2002." Otemae journal of humanities 3: 229-246.
online
Ōta, Yūzō. Basil Hall Chamberlain: Portrait of a Japanologist. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1998.
ISBN1873410735.
Chamberlain, Basil Hall and Joseph Cronin. The Mouse is Still Alive: Thoughts and Reflections, translated from the French with an introduction by Joseph Cronin. Kyoto, Japan: 2015.
ISBN9781312880467. A translation into English of Hall's 1933 work ...encore est vive la Souris: Pensées et Réflexions, together with a detailed biographical study by Cronin (pp. 9-63: "For Truth Has Always Two Sides Nearly Balanced"). Illustrated.