Carmen Blacker: The Foreigner Who Visited the Juku

2016/07/07

In 1951, when Keio University was reborn as a university under the new system after the war, it welcomed a 27-year-old young British woman as an international student. Well-versed in the Japanese language and specializing in the history of modern Japanese thought—particularly Yukichi Fukuzawa—she naturally chose Keio University as her place of study in Japan, a visit she had long hoped for. Let us trace the footsteps of Dr. Carmen Blacker, a researcher who served as an important bridge between Keio and the UK, and between Japan and the UK, for many years. As a former Keio student, she later formed a friendship with Her Majesty the Empress and lectured on Japanese culture during the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Japan.

Carmen Elizabeth Blacker was born in 1924 in Surrey to a family with no prior connection to Japan. Her grandfather, Carlos, was a close friend of the playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde and an avid book collector. Although he could hardly be called a connoisseur—often being sold large quantities of cheap items by bookstores—he was a widely known intellectual. Her father, Carlos Paton, became an expert in psychiatry and eugenics after serving with distinction in World War I. Reflecting this intellectual lineage, the children grew up familiar with literature from an early age.

It is said that while her father was reading the Kojiki aloud, his comment that "the names of Japanese gods are long" sparked the imagination of the young girl, who had never even heard the Japanese language. Specifically, she reportedly took an interest in "Konohanasakuya-hime," the deity of Mount Fuji.

According to her memory, the 12-year-old Blacker asked her parents for a Japanese textbook as a birthday present. This was before the war. It was nearly impossible to find a Japanese textbook, especially one for children, even in London. After searching all over London, her mother finally found a grammar book: the third edition of "An Elementary Grammar of the Japanese Language" by Tatsui Baba. In fact, at this point, Blacker had already made her first encounter with Keio University.

This is because Baba, a samurai of the Tosa Domain who later became a fighter in the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, had traveled to Edo in 1866 and knocked on the gates of the Fukuzawa Juku as one of Fukuzawa's early students. After teaching at Keio University, he went to the UK as a government-sponsored student from the Tosa Domain. In 1873, during his studies abroad, he wrote the aforementioned Japanese grammar book and took a stand against the arguments of Arinori Mori and others who advocated for making English the national language. It could be called fate that the Japanese textbook by Baba, who met an unfortunate death at a young age in America, eventually found its way into the hands of a young British girl.

Even so, pronunciation is difficult to learn from a textbook alone. Blacker began studying Japanese in earnest in 1941, when she started receiving lessons from Francis Piggott, a former military attaché at the British Embassy in Japan. The reader she used began with "Saita, saita, sakura ga saita" (The cherry blossoms have bloomed), which suggests it was a fourth-generation state-designated textbook.

Later, as the war intensified, Blacker began attending the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London to study East Asian languages as part of the wartime cooperation effort. Shortly thereafter, she was recruited to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. During this period, when she had absolutely no interest in her work there, her mental oasis was Arthur Waley's translation of "The Tale of Genji," which she had borrowed. Blacker was soon introduced to the translator himself, and after the war, she studied Japanese language and literature at SOAS under his guidance, graduating with first-class honors in 1947.

However, that same year, when she moved to Somerville College, Oxford, she decided to temporarily step away from her beloved Japanese and Japanese studies. She felt that unless she first studied fields unrelated to language, such as history or sociology, she could not become a truly useful person. She chose the history of 18th and 19th-century European political thought, which, combined with her original enthusiasm for Japan, would lead her toward Fukuzawa research a few years later.

Around 1949, Blacker was awarded a scholarship by the British Treasury, but her arrival in Japan was delayed because the issuance of visas for Japan researchers had been suspended under the policy of General MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. However, in 1951, after she had spent a year at Harvard, visas suddenly began to be issued following MacArthur's dismissal. After a seven-week voyage by ship, she finally landed in Kobe.

There, she contacted Eiichi Kiyooka, a grandson of Fukuzawa and a professor in the Faculty of Law, who was then the director of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Jukukan-kyoku (Keio Corporate Administration). Kiyooka, who himself taught English and had authored Japanese textbooks, provided every possible convenience for this first post-war foreign student. At the newly established Keio University, where the graduate school was still being organized, he decided to welcome Blacker under the "old-system graduate school" framework. As a result, she was able to enjoy numerous privileges not granted to other graduate students. It was none other than Blacker who contributed the foreword to the 1966 new edition of Kiyooka's English translation of "The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa."

At that time, the Dean of the Faculty of Letters was Junzaburo Nishiwaki, a scholar-poet who had studied English linguistics at Oxford University in the 1920s and led modernism in Japan. To help Blacker with her student life shortly after her arrival, Nishiwaki introduced her to Hiro Ishibashi, then a student in the Department of English Literature. The two formed a lifelong friendship. Blacker visited Ueno Gakuen University—which was founded by Ishibashi's grandfather and where Ishibashi herself would later become president—many times to give lectures.

Her life as an international student was not solely about studying. She marveled at the efforts of the Cheer Group during the Waseda-Keio rivalry, gained the friendship of Ichizaemon Morimura (the 7th), and was invited to the residence of Jiro Osaragi in Kamakura. In Kamakura, she had another important encounter: with Zen. After passing through several Zen gates, she joined a sesshin (meditation retreat) at Engaku-ji Temple, where many Keio students were said to practice at the time, and began to touch the world of Zen that had interested her since before her arrival. Later, Blacker would be drawn to Shugendo and Esoteric Buddhism, and her interest in the religiosity of the Japanese people deepened through these practices.

After publishing an English translation of Fukuzawa's "Kyuhanjo" (Conditions in the Old Domain) as the culmination of her Fukuzawa research in Japan, Blacker returned to the UK in July 1953. She returned to the University of London and spent two years writing her doctoral dissertation. Published by Cambridge University Press in 1964, "The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi" was an ambitious research work that surveyed not only Fukuzawa but also the history of Japanese political thought from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era.

Blacker had already begun teaching Japanese at the University of Cambridge in 1955, and in 1958, she was appointed as a full-time lecturer. She taught Japanese language, literature, and cultural studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies until her retirement in 1991. However, she always visited Japan during long vacations to renew old friendships and participated in mountain asceticism at places like Mount Hiei and the Dewa Sanzan to solidify her unique insights. The result was "The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan" (1975), a groundbreaking study that explored the ancient layers of the Japanese spirit within vanishing religious rituals and folktales while maintaining a Western perspective.

The year 1958 was also the 100th anniversary of the founding of Keio University. Blacker, then only 34, was invited as the representative of the University of Cambridge to the commemorative ceremony held in Hiyoshi and the ceremony for delivering messages from universities around the world held in Mita. This was a truly symbolic event, and thereafter, she not only visited Japan herself but also spared no effort in supporting various Japanese researchers coming to the UK. It is a great regret for both Blacker and Keio that she was unable to participate in the 150th-anniversary ceremony due to health reasons.

Professor Andrew Armour of the Keio University Faculty of Letters was a student who was directly supervised by Blacker at Cambridge in the mid-1970s. According to his recollections, her classes at that time dealt with Japanese religion and modern literature. Students reportedly listened intently to Blacker's words, which were not particularly eloquent during class, for that very reason. One day, while reading Yasunari Kawabata's "Thousand Cranes," the students were taking turns reading aloud. When they reached the passage about the famous birthmark on Chikako's breast, Blacker reportedly said with some fluster, "I think we can skip this part." This apparent contradiction between her Victorian morality and her nature of disliking convention—"That was Carmen," Professor Armour reminisces.

Regarding the experience of learning Japanese in the 1940s, Blacker said: "The most appropriate expression would be 'shugyo' (ascetic training). One must dedicate oneself, concentrate, and be willing to cast aside frivolity. This is surely similar to what Yukichi Fukuzawa described in his autobiography as being necessary to learn Dutch studies in 1858. (...) None [of the students at Tekijuku] knew or cared whether Dutch studies would be useful in their later lives. Similarly, no one in our generation looked toward permanent posts or economically blessed careers. Such things did not exist in the first place. This work was so captivating in itself, and so difficult, that we united as a small but honorable group of companions who had acquired specialized knowledge."

Blacker, who lamented the rapidly vanishing old culture and religiosity of Japan, shared with Fukuzawa a certain academic attitude that was also being lost. It can be said that it was a great stroke of luck for Keio University to have been able to welcome such a researcher as its first post-war international student.