E73 - Weebs of the Ages: Lafcadio Hearn, the “Brownie” who taught Japan to want whiteness

Living in Japan, the dominant image of Lafcadio Hearn is something like: he’s that white man who came to Japan and told us he believed in us—he knew we had it in us to become the honorary-white vassal of Anglo-America that we are today! A new TV drama on the national broadcaster NHK lavishes screen time on a klutzy Lafcadio adorably befuddled by Japanese culture, baffled by the Japanese language, and played by a blue-eyed English actor—which is especially interesting because the real Lafcadio was a brown man born of the last Crusade, or maybe the first color...