Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“I have always endorsed Heine's defense of plagiarism, that it is permissible to steal entire columns and porticoes from a temple, providing the new edifice one erects with their aid is great enough.”