Early Life
Yoshida was born in Tokyo as the eldest son of Shigeru Yoshida, who at the time was a diplomat posted in Rome (and later became Prime Minister of Japan). His mother Yukiko, a daughter of Count Makino Nobuaki, left Tokyo soon after Ken'ichi's birth to join her husband, so he was raised at the Makino household during the first few years of his life. He started living with his parents at the age of six, when his father was posted in Qingdao. Thereafter he lived in Paris, London, and Tianjin (where he studied at a school for British children) before moving back to Tokyo where he graduated from secondary school. In October 1930 he enrolled at King's College of the University of Cambridge, where he became a student of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, but moved back to Tokyo in February 1931, on Dickinson's advice that in order to devote his life to literature he should live in Japan. During the next few years he studied French in Tokyo. His début as a writer was in 1935 with a translation of Edgar Allan Poe's Memorandum (Oboegaki).
Read more about this topic: Ken'ichi Yoshida (literary Scholar)
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