A Cultural Understanding of Koizumi Yakumo―― centered on the Saiwa writings about Japanese plants ――

• Main Authors: Ching-Ru Yang, 楊靜如
• Other Authors: Lung-Chih Heng-Tien
• Format: Others
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/934ywu

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用日語學系碩士班 === 93 === The differences in customs or views between nations arise from the cultural background differences. What is required for both nations understand each other deeply? Of course, tone must grasp the trend of the modern society. However, it is clear that this is inadequate for understanding foreign culture deeply. Since culture is formed over a long time, if you want to understand a nation and its culture deeply, you have to absorb the information about its humanities, customs and common superstitions. This is certainly true in the case of Japan. Literature offers one perspective about a country’s situation. With this in mind, the writings of Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn) are taken up in this thesis. In fact, Koizumi Yakumo produced many writings about Japanese folk customs and traditions in intelligible language. But Koizumi Yakumo was not Japanese. He was a writer who was devoted to researching Japanese culture as foreigner striving for good cultural understanding and introducing that to others overseas. Just because he was a foreigner, he might make discoveries that even the Japanese nation did not notice. His writings were received positively by many Japanese writers, including Natsume Souseki. This paper researched Koizumi Yakumo’s saiwa writings, which are about Japanese plants. Consequently, it is shown clearly that Koizumi Yakumo continued to grow his interest in plants during his stay in Japan, and through researching Japanese plants he understood even more about Japanese people’s life-style, faith and their thinking.