page_title: Reginald Horace Blyth
section_title: Japan (1936–1964)
hierarchical_section_title: Reginald Horace Blyth / Japan (1936–1964)
caption_attribution_description: Tomb of Reginald Horace Blyth, 1898 - 1964
context_page_description: Reginald Horace Blyth was an English author and devotee of Japanese culture. He is most famous for his writings on Zen and on haiku poetry.
context_section_description: Having returned to Seoul in 1936, Blyth remarried in 1937, to a Japanese woman named Kijima Tomiko, with whom he later had two daughters, Nana Blyth and Harumi Blyth. 1940 they moved to Kanazawa, D. T. Suzuki's home town, in Japan, and Blyth took a job as English teacher at the Fourth Higher School (later Kanazawa University).
  When Britain declared war on Japan in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing Japan into World War II, Blyth was interned as a British enemy alien. Although he expressed his sympathy for Japan and sought Japanese citizenship, this was denied. During his internment his extensive library was destroyed in an air raid. In the internment camp in Kobe he finished his first book Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics and wrote parts of his books about haiku and senryu. He also met in the camp Robert Aitken, later Roshi of the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu.
  After the war, Blyth worked diligently with the authorities, both Japanese and American, to ease the transition to peace. Blyth functioned as liaison to the Japanese Imperial Household, and his close friend, Harold Gould Henderson, was on General Douglas MacArthur's staff. Together, they helped draft the declaration Ningen Sengen, by which Emperor Hirohito declared himself to be a human being, and not divine.
  By 1946, Blyth had become Professor of English at Gakushuin University, and became private tutor to the Crown Prince (later emperor) Akihito until the end of his [Blyth's] life. He did much to popularise Zen philosophy and Japanese poetry (particularly haiku) in the West. In 1954, he was awarded a doctorate in literature from Tokyo University, and, in 1959, he received the Zuihōshō (Order of Merit) Fourth Grade.
  Blyth died in 1964, probably of a brain tumour and complications from pneumonia, in the Seiroka Hospital in Tokyo. He was buried in the cemetery of the Shokozan Tokei Soji Zenji Temple in Kamakura, next to his old friend, D. T. Suzuki. Blyth's posthumous Buddhist name is Bulaisu Kodo Shoshin Koju.
  He left the following death poem: 
  Sazanka ni kokoro nokoshite tabidachinu
  I leave my heart
  to the sasanqua flower
  on the day of this journey
caption: Blyth's tomb in Kamakura.
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