Basil Hall Chamberlain


Basil Hall Chamberlain was a professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University and one of the foremost British Japanologists active in Japan during the late 19th century. 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.

Early life

Chamberlain was born in Southsea 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. His many works include the first translation of the Kojiki into English, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, Things Japanese, and A Practical Guide to the Study of Japanese Writing. A keen traveller despite chronic weak health, he cowrote 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. Percival Lowell dedicated his travelogue Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan to Chamberlain.
Chamberlain sent many Japanese artifacts to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford.
He left Japan in 1911 and moved to Geneva, where he lived until his death in 1935.

Works by Chamberlain