Reginald Horace Blyth

Some accounts say they moved to India, where he taught for a while until he became unhappy with British colonial rule, but most scholars dismiss this episode, claiming it to have been invented or misunderstood by Blyth's mentor Daisetz T.

While in Korea, Blyth began to learn Japanese and Chinese, and studied Zen under the master Hanayama Taigi of Myōshin-ji Keijo Betsuin (Seoul).

[3] Having returned to Seoul in 1936, Blyth remarried in 1937, to a Japanese woman named Kijima Tomiko,[4] with whom he had two daughters.

When Britain declared war on Japan in December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Blyth was interned as a British enemy alien.

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.

In 1954, he was awarded a doctorate in literature from Tokyo University, and, in 1959, he received the Zuihōshō (Order of Merit) Fourth Grade.

He was buried in the cemetery of the Shokozan Tokei Soji Zenji Temple in Kamakura, next to his old friend, D. T. Suzuki.

Blyth produced a series of work on Zen, haiku and senryū, and on other forms of Japanese and Asian literature.

Further publications include studies of English literature (1942, 1957, 1959(b)) and a three-fifths shortened version of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by his favourite author Henry David Thoreau, along with an introduction and explanatory notes.

Blyth's Mumonkan was the third complete translation into English, but the first one which was accompanied by extensive interpretive commentaries on each case.

These include the San Francisco and Beat Generation writers, Gary Snyder,[13] Philip Whalen,[14] Jack Kerouac[15] and Allen Ginsberg,[16] as well as J. D. Salinger ("...particularly haiku, but senryu, too...can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth was on them.

The French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes read 1967 Blyth's four-volume set, using it for lectures and seminars on haiku 1979.

[23] Some also noted that Blyth did not view haiku by Japanese women favourably, that he downplayed their contribution to the genre, especially during the Bashō era.