Basil Hall Chamberlain Things Japanese (1890)

Abstract

Basil Hall Chamberlain was born in 1850, in Southsea in the naval port of Portsmouth. The Chamberlain family was a prestigious family with ties to the Royal Navy; his father was a rear admiral in the Navy and his mother was also from an old-established family. His maternal grandfather was Captain Basil Hall, a naval captain known for his surveys of the coasts of Korea and the Ryukyu Islands. At the age of eight, his mother died, and he and his two younger brothers were raised by their grandmother in Versailles, where they attended high school (lycée). At the age of 17, he spent a year in Spain, but due to his physical ailments, he decided not to go to university. He resigned from a bank where he had been working, and spent about 3 years in Malta and other parts of Europe. He came to Japan in May 1873 (Meiji 6) at the age of 22, and the next year he was taken on as a tutor in the Japanese Naval Academy, teaching English and mathematics while publishing a series of studies on Japanese poetry and grammar in The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. He published The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (1880), “A Translation of the ‘Ko-ji-ki’, or Records of Ancient Matters” (1882) and other works. In 1886, he began lecturing on Japanese linguistics and philology at Tokyo Imperial University, where he also began research on the Ainu people and the Ryukyu Islands, making a major contribution to Japanese linguistics. In addition to his professional papers, he left behind A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (co-written with W. B. Mason; seven editions were published from 1891 to 1913). In 1911, he left Japan to live out the rest of his life on the shores of Lake Geneva, where he died in 1935 at the age of 85. In his later years he wrote …encore est vive la Souris (1933). One of his younger brothers, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was a pro-German who preached the superiority of the Germanic race in Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899) and the English edition of the same book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1911).