20 Facts About Takaaki Yoshimoto

Takaaki Yoshimoto, known as Ryumei Yoshimoto, was a Japanese poet, philosopher, and literary critic.

Takaaki Yoshimoto was born in 1924, in Tsukishima, Tokyo, the third son of family of boatmakers who managed a small boatyard.

Takaaki Yoshimoto was influenced by the work of Takamura Kotaro and Miyazawa Kenji.

Takaaki Yoshimoto was a 'militarist youth' during the war, but experienced the end of the war while mobilized for manual labor, and thereon became fascinated by Marxism.

Takaaki Yoshimoto attended Tashima Elementary School in the Kyobashi Ward of Tokyo, Yonezawa Engineering School, and graduated in 1947 from the Engineering Division of Tokyo Institute of Technology with a degree in Electrochemistry.

Takaaki Yoshimoto continued his poetic output, writing his first representative works, Dialogue with Particularity and Ten Works for a Change in Position, and won the Arechi prize for new poets.

Takaaki Yoshimoto published a work of criticism on Takamura Kotaro.

Takaaki Yoshimoto, who had pursued a theory of war responsibility of the literati, supported the Anpo Protests against the 1960 revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty as an expression of the contradictions of the postwar order fifteen years after the end of the war.

Takaaki Yoshimoto was invited to give speeches at Zengakuren meetings in December 1959 and January 1960, and he joined the student activists in a sit-in at Shinagawa Station in Tokyo as part of a nationwide general strike against the Treaty on June 4,1960.

Takaaki Yoshimoto concluded that the only path forward was to reject the oppression of existence and pursue absolute individual autonomy.

In September 1961, Takaaki Yoshimoto co-founded the magazine Experiment with like-minded activists Tanigawa Gan and Murakami Ichiro, as a place to publish essays and criticism completely independently of any established organization.

New Left activists especially appreciated that Takaaki Yoshimoto was developing a positive theoretical discourse in the midst of the collapse of the Communist Party's heroic status after the failure of the anti-Treaty movement and endless, contentious and dispiriting schisms within the left.

Takaaki Yoshimoto's books became best-sellers, especially his 1962 essay collection The End of Fictions, named after his famous 1960 essay of the same name.

Takaaki Yoshimoto eventually concluded that even the radically egalitarian and highly individualistic New Left protest groups were not individualistic enough, and were still part of the same form of "communal fantasy" which had led Japan into World War II.

Indeed, afterwards Takaaki Yoshimoto did become more politically conservative, becoming a supporter of Ichiro Ozawa.

Takaaki Yoshimoto was a wide-ranging author who wrote on literature, subculture, politics, society, and religion.

Takaaki Yoshimoto is known as a giant of postwar thought, and had an enormous influence in the 1960s and 1970s in Japan.

Takaaki Yoshimoto published many dialogues with overseas intellectuals visiting Japan, such as Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, Ivan Illich, and Jean Baudrillard.

Takaaki Yoshimoto, who did not hold an academic pedigree, supported intellectuals who have devoted themselves to solitary study.

Takaaki Yoshimoto has engaged in a number of belligerent exchanges.