Yasujiro

"Yasujiro was four (five by the Japanese way of reckoning) when his mother left him at the end of the bridge. To the end of his days he never forgot that desolate moment when he stood, abandoned, watching her walk away. The image was for ever etched into his memory. For the little child it was an experience that was to shape the whole of his life."

"But in Japan he was remembered above all for his voracious sexual appetite. He had seven acknowledged children, of whom three could be called legitimate. No one knew how many others he had fathered. Some put the figure at fifty, some at a hundred. Wherever you turned in Seibu, it was said, there was a drop of the old man. As for the mothers of those children, even Yasujiro himself would probably not have known who they all were."

"Yasujiro was there for a purpose. Among the booths at the exposition he found what he was looking for: phosphate fertiliser. He also had a stroke of luck. It turned out that the president of the company which produced the phosphate, Osaka Chemicals, was a Shiga man himself — an Omi merchant. He would be bound to understand young Yasujiro and what he wanted. Reassured by the news, Yasujiro made an appointment with the president, a Mr Ichizaburo Abe, and went in to see him."

"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.’"

"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]"