A Japanese Named "T. Tsutsumi"

The Bureau of Investigation files all refer to Takashi Tsutsumi or T. Tsutsumi, but English-language newspapers in Hawaii sometimes referred to him as N. Tsutsumi and treated him as an entirely different person. When Tsutsumi took the stand at the Sakamaki dynamiting trial, he was first asked by the prosecutor which initial was correct. The character for his given name was pronounced "Noboru," but it is more commonly read as "Takashi." The mistake followed him around even in Japan.

Noboru Tsutsumi was born on April 8, 1890, in Kozuhata^[*] , Eigenji town, Kanzaki-gun, Shiga prefecture. Kozuhata is a village nestled in a mountain valley of lotus fields bordering on Mie prefecture. Most of the inhabitants made their living from woodcutting and charcoal making. The number of families living in the village today is 168, three times that in the 1890s, and the village is now famous as a place to view maple foliage in the autumn. One of the two temples in the village, Jogenji^[*] of the Higashi Honganji sect, was administered by the family into which Noboru Tsutsumi was born. He was the third son, with two older brothers and two younger sisters. As he grew up the villagers called Noboru "temple boy."

Since his father, Reizui Kurokawa, the fifteenth-generation chief priest, had a weak constitution, he was not a very dominant force in the family. His mother, Masano, who had come from the neighboring village's temple, took charge of everything. Masano was Reizui's cousin. According to her nephew Hajime Furukawa (b. 1897), second son of her oldest brother who inherited the temple where Masano was born, Masano was the one who actually ran the Jogenji temple and cultivated some fields as well. Since Furukawa's mother had died when he was an

infant, Masano took on that role. She never raised her voice to scold him or her own children.

According to Furukawa, his cousin Noboru was the child most like Masano, not only in appearance but also in personality. Furukawa was attached to his cousin, whom he called "No-san^[*] ," and often followed him around. It was No-san who took him into the nearby mountains and taught him which leaves and berries were edible. No-san was extremely adept at catching loaches in the rice paddies. Noboru was also known as a "bright boy" from his days at Kozuhata^[*] primary school, which still stands at the crest of the hill above Jogenji^[*] temple.

The temple raised silkworms as a side business. Shelves for spring and summer breeds of silkworms lined all the rooms but the main worship hall. Noboru and the other children diligently gathered mulberry leaves for the silkworms in large baskets on their backs. Silkworms were the only source of the temple's cash income. In a poor village like Kozuhata, offerings to the temple consisted of rice and vegetables harvested in the fields. The priest's family did not want for food, but there was never much cash on hand. The eldest son, Eseki, who knew he was to succeed his father, did not study hard. But the second son, Ekan, and Noboru, four years younger, were gifted students, and their school tuition came entirely from the income earned by the silkworms. After graduating from upper primary school both went off to normal school.

On finishing fourth grade many of the boys from this area were sent to Kyoto and Osaka to become apprentices, dreaming of the day when they would set up their own shops and become full-fledged merchants in the Omi^[*] region.^[3] Unlike the other village families, the priest had his dignity to consider and could not send his children off to be apprenticed to shopkeepers. Neither did the family have the means to provide their sons with advanced education. Normal school was the only place they could receive more schooling without paying tuition. Normal school students boarded for one year of preparatory subjects and four years of regular work, and all fees, from books to uniforms, were covered at public expense. When there were other necessary expenditures, public-spirited temple parishioners helped out.

Following in his brother's footsteps, Noboru enrolled in the Shiga normal school in Otsu^[*] . Though he did not spend all his time at his desk, Noboru's grades placed him consistently at the top of his class for the five years he studied there. Not only was he popular among his fellow students, he was also uniformly liked by the teachers and the house mas-

ters. He was also known for antics like putting a frog into the bed of the instructor who had overnight duty in the dormitory and for being suspended from school when he was discovered smoking. His cousin, Hajime Furukawa, who also attended the normal school because of similar family circumstances, was surprised and proud to find out that the legendary student known as "Dragon Tsutsumi,"^[4] about whom stories were handed down even after his graduation, was his cousin No-san^[*] .

After completing Shiga normal school, Noboru entered Hiroshima higher normal school, where he majored in biology and agriculture. His mentor was Shigenao Konishi, a scholar of education who taught there after study abroad in Germany and later became a professor at Kyoto Imperial University. On graduating, Noboru entered the liberal arts department at Kyoto University in 1913. The campus was in the midst of strife, thrown into disorder when professors opposed President Seitaro^[*] Sawayanagi on a personnel matter and the entire faculty of the department of law submitted its resignation. Ultimately, the education minister intervened to settle the matter, and the president was relieved of his duties at his own request. The Sawayanagi incident, as it later became know, was the first step toward establishing the autonomy of university faculty self-government in Japan. The incident may have influenced Tsutsumi's later thinking.

Noboru entered the university as an education major, but according to a résumé he wrote later on, he graduated as a philosophy major. The star of the philosophy department at the time was Professor Kitaro^[*] Nishida, whose philosophy contrasted traditional Eastern thought such as Zen Buddhism with Western philosophy and whose volume A Study of Good (Zen no Kenkyu^[*] ; 1911) was widely read. After World War II, Nishida would be criticized as an ideologue of imperial absolutism, but in those days many students gathered to hear his lectures. Such an ideological climate may well have affected Noboru's intellectual development.

During his days at the university it is unlikely that Noboru's interest lay in social causes. His cousin Furukawa recalls Noboru mentioning that he had caught a glimpse of Fumimaro Konoe, a future prime minister, and Koichi^[*] Kido, a future cabinet minister and imperial court official, at Nishida's lectures. Yet there is no talk that Noboru, like Konoe and others, was ever interested in the classes of Hajime Kawakami, who became a leading Marxist economist and thinker in the 1920s. Neither did Noboru show any particular interest in leftist incidents and activi-

ties, such as the High Treason incident (1910) that stirred the country while he was at Hiroshima higher normal school, the formation of the Yuaikai^[*] (Friendly Society) by Suzuki Bunji in 1912, or the labor movements led by Sen Katayama and others.

While at Kyoto Imperial University, Noboru was a member of the riding club. He counted horseback riding among his great pleasures. It is said that he cut a dashing figure and turned heads as he rode. Conspicuously tall for a man of that period, Noboru was slender, with a high forehead, straight nose, and deeply etched features set in an elongated face. His eyes had a straightforward gaze, extremely intelligent yet gentle.

To all appearances Noboru led a carefree and easygoing student life, but he was already a married man with a wife and daughter. When he entered Kyoto Imperial University he changed his name from Noboru Kurokawa to Noboru Tsutsumi. He was adopted into his wife's family on the condition that they would take care of all his tuition and living expenses. His older brother, Ekan, after graduating from Shiga normal school and Tohoku^[*] University, also was adopted into his wife's family and was studying at the faculty of medicine at Kyoto Imperial University. Only the firstborn son, Eseki, inherited the family profession of temple priest. Adoption into another family was one way for superfluous second and younger sons to survive. It was quite common for a promising student to be adopted into his bride's family and to have his tuition paid for.

The Tsutsumi family lived in Nagahama on the shores of Lake Biwa in Shiga prefecture. It was an old family that traced its history back seven generations. The head of the family, Taizo^[*] Tsutsumi, a prominent local figure, was a physician, and his wife, Koto, was Noboru's father's older sister. Noboru's bride, their youngest daughter, Chiyo, was his cousin. Noboru had been critical of his own parents' marriage between cousins, but he found himself pushed into a similar one.

The Tsutsumi family was in no particular need of a successor. Chiyo had two older brothers. The elder was already a practicing physician in a branch clinic of his father's in Nagahama, and the younger was in medical school. Chiyo's two older sisters had married into wealthy families. Raised as the youngest child, basking in her parents' love, Chiyo was so gentle that her mother had not wanted her to face the difficulties of marrying into another family. Koto had long since set her eyes on her personable and bright nephew Noboru as a prospective husband for her younger daughter, who was one year older than Noboru.

Even after the wedding Chiyo continued to live with her parents in the Tsutsumi clinic. Noboru boarded in Kyoto, returning to the Tsutsumi house during term breaks. Chiyo often asked her mother when Noboru-san was coming home, but she showed no eagerness to look after him in Kyoto. At her parents' home the housework was done by several maids, so she continued to live as the young lady of the house. The only person Noboru could complain to was his brother Ekan, who also disliked being an adopted son. "I try to rise up [noboro^[*] ], rise up, but my other half says fall down [ochiyo ], fall down," he said. Ochiyo's nature was gentle, but to Noboru she was "the daughter of the house" and a wife who always asked her mother's advice first. Noboru once told his niece, Kimiko Kurokawa, "They say if you have three cups of rice bran don't get adopted by marriage into another family." To be sure, Noboru had no financial worries. Not only was he given enough money for living expenses, he could go occasionally to the geisha houses with his brother, even though both were still only students. Noboru should have had no reason to be discontent. Even his father-in-law, Taizo^[*] , was not someone to make him feel ill at ease. Yet the better Noboru was treated, the more he seemed to have reproached himself at being beholden to his wife's family.^[5]

After his father's death Noboru's oldest brother inherited the family temple, but troubles ensued when this brother brought a woman from the pleasure quarters into his household. In 1914, in the midst of these difficulties, his mother, Masano, died, and the next year Chiyo bore Noboru's eldest daughter, Michiko. A year and a half later, graduation from Kyoto Imperial University put an end to Noboru's long years of student life.

The world outside Japan was caught in the vortex of war and revolution; the United States entered the fight against Germany; in Russia the Romanoff dynasty was destroyed by the February Revolution; and in October the Bolshevik Revolution led to the establishment of the Soviet Union. Noboru, however, was making plans to go to Hawaii. His eldest daughter, Michiko, recalls hearing that for about six months after graduation her father helped out at the local bureau of the newspaper Osaka mainichi shinbun , but his plans for going to Hawaii were already under way, so the job must have been temporary. His brother Ekan, who graduated from medical school at the same time, left the adoptive family that he so disliked and took back the name Kurokawa despite having a daughter. His mind was set on pursuing his studies in Germany. It is said that Noboru proposed his own plan to go abroad while drinking

with his brother. "If you're going by way of the Indian Ocean to Germany, I'll go across the Pacific Ocean to America." he said. "Let's have a reunion in New York. That will mean we two brothers will have circled the world."

In any case, in February 1918 Noboru boarded the Shunyo-maru^[*] , a Toyo^[*] Steamship vessel leaving the port of Yokohama. Among those seeing him off was his wife, holding the hand of his charming three-year-old daughter, Michiko. "I'll send for you in a year's time," Noboru promised Chiyo. Six months later Chiyo bore their oldest son, Toshio. Though he did not leave his adoptive family as Ekan had, Noboru went abroad to escape his status as adopted son-in-law. On reaching Hawaii, however, he noted on his immigration entry forms that Taizo^[*] Tsutsumi, his father-in-law, was his household head. His trip abroad was possible only with funds provided by the Tsutsumi family.

It is said that Noboru Tsutsumi consulted his professor Shigenao Konishi about going abroad. Perhaps thanks to Konishi's introduction, the entry card preserved at the Honolulu Consulate General states that the purpose of his voyage was his employment as the principal of the Japanese high school in Hilo. To be more accurate, since there was no independent high school in Hilo, he was employed in the upper division of Hilo middle school. He listed as his initial contact person Kikuzo^[*] Tanaka, principal of the Japanese primary school in Hilo. Tanaka, who was also a graduate of Hiroshima higher normal school, had been Konishi's student and must have been acquainted with Tsutsumi during their school days. For Noboru Tsutsumi, Hawaii was merely a convenient stepping-stone to the American mainland.