12 Facts About Takeo Arishima

Takeo Arishima was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer and essayist during the late Meiji and Taisho periods.

Takeo Arishima's son was the internationally known film and stage actor, Masayuki Mori.

Takeo Arishima was first sent to a mission school in Yokohama, where he was taught English, after which he entered preparatory school of the prestigious Gakushuin peer's school, when he was 10 years old.

Takeo Arishima subsequently became influenced by Uchimura Kanzo and became a Christian in 1901.

Takeo Arishima recorded his experiences from his journey to America in his diary.

Takeo Arishima wrote novels and literary criticisms and was known as one of the central figures in the Shirakaba group.

Takeo Arishima first achieved fame in 1917 with The Descendents of Cain, which depicts God's curse on both man and nature through the eyes of a self-destructive tenant farmer.

In 1922, Takeo Arishima implemented the socialist philosophy he had been developing by renunciation of the ownership of a large tenant farm in Hokkaido, which he had inherited from his father, publicly stating that he wanted to distance himself from the petit bourgeois in the coming revolution.

Takeo Arishima married in 1910, but his wife died in 1916 of tuberculosis leaving him three children.

In 1922, Takeo Arishima met Akiko Hatano, a married woman and an editor working for the Fujin Koron, a famous women's magazine.

Takeo Arishima's contemporaries regarded Arishima as a philosopher and social critic as much as a novelist.

Takeo Arishima's writing was critical of Christianity and strongly influenced by socialism; emotionally intense, humanistic, and employed ideas from the Bible, Tolstoy, and anarchic socialism.