Kiyozaemon

"By now the boy had quite a reputation in the village for being a roughneck. The one person he respected was his grandfather. ‘What shall I do?’ he asked. ‘I want you to stay here and be a peasant.’[13] So Yasujiro stayed in Yagiso village. Kiyozaemon was nearly seventy. It was time for young Yasujiro to take over as the head of the household. He had to grow up quickly, and took his duties seriously. Every day, well before the sun rose, while the stars were still glimmering in the sky, he shouldered his tools and tramped along the dark earthen paths between the houses out to the fields. Yet he had not been to school for nothing. He realised that hard work was not enough. All the villagers worked hard, they were all stooped and gnarled from a life of hard work; but they all used the same antiquated farming methods. No matter how hard they worked, every year the rice crop was poor. What was needed was study. Study, in fact, might be the way to escape from the narrow world of the village, with its grinding poverty. So Yasujiro began to read books on agriculture. Night after night, when everyone else was asleep, the night light would still be flickering in the ramshackle farmhouse. The old men of the village muttered to each other, ‘That one will do well when he grows up.’"

"Sixty years before, when Grandfather Kiyozaemon was growing up, Japan had been a feudal country, under the rule of what was in effect a military dictatorship. For two hundred and fifty years, a quarter of a millennium, beginning in 1600, the Tokugawa shoguns had governed the country. They had established peace and order after years of civil war, but only by establishing a system of extremely tight controls."

"Old Kiyozaemon’s last words to his grandson, according to Yasujiro’s official biography, were: ‘The restoration of the Tsutsumi house is not a matter of making money. Making money is fine, but more than that — make the Tsutsumi house an honourable house!’[16]"