ARISHIMA TAKEO

born March 4, 1878, Tokyo, Japan died June 9, 1923, Karuizawa Japanese novelist known in his country as the man of love for his humanitarian idealism. Arishima was the eldest son of a talented and aristocratic family; his younger brothers included the painter Arishima Ikuma and the novelist Satomi Ton. He went to the Peers School, where he was chosen as a companion to the crown prince. He went on to Sapporo Agricultural School (now Hokkaido University), which was noted in the late 19th century as a centre of modern thought. There he was awakened to the plight of the lower classes. Arishima had studied English from childhood, and, after graduating in 1896, he went to the United States, where he spent three years at Harvard University. After returning to Japan, Arishima taught school in Sapporo and Kyoto; but in 1910 he joined his brothers and their friends Shiga Naoya and Mushanokoji Saneatsu in publishing the journal Shirakaba (White Birch), which was dedicated to disseminating the humanistic and benevolent ideals shared by the young men. Arishima seems to have struggled most deeply with the social contradictions inherent in his position as a wealthy aristocrat that conflicted with his ideal of universal love. His novel Kain no matsuei (1917; Descendants of Cain), dealing with the miserable condition of tenant farmers, attracted little attention, but he soon received recognition with the novel Aru onna (1919; A Certain Woman, 1978). In 1922 he published Sengen hitotsu (A Manifesto), in which he expressed his despairing conviction that only the labouring classes could help themselves and that there was nothing he as a bourgeois ideologist could do for them. That year he distributed his land and farms in Hokkaido among the tenants; the following year he committed suicide with his mistress at a mountain retreat.