James Murdoch (Scottish journalist)


James Murdoch was a Scottish scholar and journalist, who worked as a teacher in the Empire of Japan and Australia. From 1903–1917, he wrote the three-volume A History of Japan, the first comprehensive history of Japan in the English language. The third volume was published posthumously in 1926.

Early life

Murdoch was born in Stonehaven, near Aberdeen, in Scotland. He exhibited signs of intellectual brilliance as a child, and although his family was of moderate means, he won a scholarship to Aberdeen University where he completed a bachelor's and master's degree. He subsequently studied at Worcester College, Oxford University, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Paris. Murdoch studied Sanskrit under Theodor Benfey while at the University of Göttingen.
Regarded as a genius in foreign languages, at the age of 24, he suddenly resigned from his post as a professor and decided to emigrate to Australia.

Life in Australia

Murdoch taught in Queensland Australia from July 1881 – 1889 as headmaster of the new Maryborough Grammar School. He became unpopular with the trustees and he was dismissed in March 1885. He worked for the next two years as assistant master at Brisbane Grammar School. In 1886, he also sat for the Bar examinations, but failed in two of the eight papers because he had mistakenly attempted to answer every question. He left the school at his own wish and became a journalist at the radical nationalist journal, the Boomerang. In a series of articles he predicted that within a generation the Australian colonies would form an independent republic, which would turn socialist through a violent revolution unless the harsh living conditions of the working classes were alleviated.

Life in Japan

Murdoch came to Japan as a foreign advisor, from September 1889 – 1893 as a professor of European history at the First Higher School, an elite institution for young men entering the Tokyo Imperial University. His most famous student during his first period in Japan was Natsume Sōseki.
In addition to teaching, he vigorously pursued literary activities. In June 1890 he published a long piece of satirical verse, Don Juan's Grandson in Japan. In November he launched a weekly magazine, the Japan Echo, which lasted for six issues. In 1892 he published From Australia and Japan and a novel, Ayame-san. His stories were romances in which the heroes tended to be academic and sporting paragons with socialist political leanings, whereas the women were both mercenary and cruel, or paragons of erudition, beauty and good breeding. He also wrote several texts for pictorial guidebooks aimed at historically-minded tourists, and edited the memoirs of Hikozo Hamada, the castaway who became the first Japanese to acquire American citizenship.

Life in Paraguay and London

In September 1893 Murdoch left Japan to join a 'New Australia' communist experimental commune in Paraguay. By the time of his arrival, however, about one-third of the colonists had seceded, and far from the socialist paradise he had imagined, he found only poverty, dissention and disease. He remained only a few days and, leaving his 12-year-old son in South America, proceeded on to London in ill health.
He spent the next five months recuperating at the British Museum translating the letters of sixteenth-century European religieux in Japan; he then returned to Japan, where he would live until 1917.

Return to Japan

From 1894 to 1897 Murdoch taught English at the Fourth Higher School at Kanazawa, Ishikawa prefecture. On 23 November 1899, while teaching economic history at the Higher Commercial College in Tokyo, he married Takeko Okada.
In 1901 Murdoch moved to the Seventh Higher School at Kagoshima, Kyūshū. He had never fully recovered from the illness he had contracted in South America and he hoped to benefit from the milder Kyūshū winters. A History of Japan During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse appeared in 1903. The European language sources in Latin, Spanish, French and Dutch were all translated by himself. Lafcadio Hearn praised the book in the "Bibliographical Notes" section of his book Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation".
In 1908, Murdoch's teaching contract was not renewed. Murdoch, nevertheless, decided to remain at Kagoshima. He contributed regularly to the Kobe Chronicle newspaper and, to supplement this income, planted a citron orchard. Although he was never to achieve fluency in speech, he had now become so proficient in classical written Japanese that he no longer had to rely on assistants. A History of Japan From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. appeared in 1910. In 1915, following the completion of the manuscript of the third volume, The Tokugawa Epoch 1652–1868'', poverty forced Murdoch back into teaching, this time at the junior high-school level.

Return to Australia

In February 1917, however, Murdoch was able to return to Australia to teach Japanese at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and at the University of Sydney, concurrent appointments instituted on the initiative of the Australian Defense Department. The following year, in response to an effort made by Waseda University to bring him back to Japan, the University of Sydney raised his status to that of a fully tenured professor. In return for £600 a year from the Defense Department, the university also permitted Murdoch to visit Japan annually to obtain first-hand information on shifts in Japanese public opinion and foreign policy. The first such visit resulted in a memorandum highly critical of Australia's intransigence on the racial equality issue raised by Japan at the Paris Peace Conference. Similarly, two years later Murdoch was called to Melbourne to give the Prime Minister of Australia his views on the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.
Murdoch died of cancer at his home at on 30 October 1921. He had just completed the research for the fourth volume of the A History of Japan but had not begun writing. He was survived by his son and by his wife.

Selected works

In an overview of writings by and about Murdoch, OCLC/WorldCat lists roughly 60+ works in 130+ publications in 4 languages and 1,300+ library holdings.
References to volume numbers can be confusing, as the books were later issued in sets where volume number does not correspond to order of original publication.