Spent all day in the hotel reading up on Malaysia and whatever I could find on Thailand (I had downloaded some info from the internet before I left Ireland, but didn't have a guidebook specifically for Thailand). Also updated this diary, and made some changes to the format.

A Unerversle Favrit

Shôkôshi, Wakamatsu Shizuko’s 1890 translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, sold tens of thousands of copies and stayed in print in Japan until 1960. Lord Cedric, with his noble courage, and his obedience and respect towards his elders, has long been seen by the Japanese as embodying the very best elements of young manliness (the reader can see how far apart Western and Japanese cultures actually are). When they named their car the Cedric, they fully expected that English-speaking countries would recognise the name at once, and immediately associate it with that novel which the Japanese really believed was known, read, and loved by nearly all English speaking people.

Lafcadio Hearn

In Ian Fleming's You only Live Twice, James Bond retorts to his nemesis Blofeld's comment of "Have you ever heard the Japanese expression kirisute gomen?" with "Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld."

Lafcadio Hearn was the son of a soldier in the British army from County Offaly, and was born on one of the Greek Ionian islands. His mother was Greek. He moved to Dublin when he was two, to be brought up by some elderly relatives, and was later educated abroad.

He later became a journalist in the US. In 1890, he went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent. He gained a teaching position in the summer of at school in Matsue, a town in western Japan on the coast of the Sea of Japan, and remained in Japan for the rest of his life. He became a naturalized Japanese citizen, married a Japanese woman and fathered a son. He wrote a number of books on Japan and is remembered in this country for his fairy tales and ghost stories.