Early Life
Yoshimoto was born in 1924, in Tsukishima, Tokyo. His family were boatmakers who had moved from Amakusa, Kumamoto prefecture, making small rental boats. In his teens Yoshimoto came under the influence of literature while receiving private tutoring, and began to write poetry in his teens. He was influenced by the work of Takamura Kotaro and Miyazawa Kenji. He 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.
Yoshimoto attended Tashima Elementary School in the Kyobashi Ward of Tokyo, Yonezawa Engineering School (Now Yamagata University), and graduated in 1947 from the Engineering Division of Tokyo Institute of Technology with an a degree in Electrochemistry. During his studies, he became acquainted with the Mathematician Toyama Hiraku.
After graduation, Yoshimoto moved to industry, became a research student in 1950, and in 1952 took a position at Tokyo Ink Manufacturing Company Ltd. He 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. He published a work of criticism, On Takamura Kotaro.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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