Yoshii Isamu

Count was a Japanese tanka poet and playwright active in Taishō and Shōwa period Japan. Attracted to European romanticism in his youth, his later works were more subdued.

Early life Yoshii Isamu was born in the elite Takanawa district Tokyo. His grandfather, Count Yoshii Tomosane was a former samurai retainer of Satsuma Domain, and member of the House of Peers, the Privy Council and official in the Imperial Household Ministry. His aunt was the wife of Field Marshal Oyama Iwao. Yoshii began to live at his father's cottage in the Zaimokuza neighborhood of Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture from 1887 and entered the elementary section of the Kamakura Normal School in 1891. The following year the family returned to Tokyo, but for the rest of his life, he returned to Kamakura frequently to recuperate from bouts of ill health (i.e. tuberculosis).

He started to write short verses while attending school at Tokyo Metropolitan No.1 Junior High School and Kogyokusha Junior High School.

Yoshii enrolled briefly in the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in 1908, but dropped out the same year to join Yosano Tekkan's Tokyo Shin-shi Sha (Tokyo New Poetry Society), and began contributing his tanka verses to the society's literary magazine, Myōjō (Bright Star). As a member of the Myōjō inner circle, he met and was influenced by Mori Ōgai, Ueda Bin, and Kitahara Hakushū.

Literary career Yoshii left Myōjō to form a new group, Pan no Kai, together with Kitahara Hakushu due to their shared attraction of romanticism and aestheticism.

In his later years, Yoshii lived in a house at the base of Mount Hiei in Kyoto, and was a frequent visitor to the Gion entertainment district. Every year on November 8, a festival is held in his memory, where the geiko and maiko of the Gion district lay flowers before a monument with his Tanka:

No matter what they say, I love Gion. Even in my sleep The sound of water Flows beneath my pillow （かにかくに 祇園はこひし寝（ぬ）るときも 枕のしたを水のながるる） Ka ni kaku ni / Gion ha koishi / nuru toki mo / makura no shita wo / mizu no nagaruru

In 1948, Yoshii was appointed to be a poetry selector for the Imperial Household's New Year poetry reading ceremony. He became a member of the Japan Art Academy the same year. Yoshii died in 1960 at the age of 74. His grave is at the Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo.