Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Tsunetomo Yamamoto ( Japanese山 本 常 朝Yamamoto Tsunetomo , also Yamamoto Jōchō ; born June 11, 1659 in Saga, Japan ; † November 30, 1719 ) was a samurai and author of Hagakure .
Live and act
Tsunetomo was born in 1659, the sixth child of Yamamoto Jin'uemon Shigezumi in Saga Province, a few decades after Tokugawa Ieyasu gained control of all of Japan , which was previously exposed to a long civil war .
Tsunetomo's father, who fought against the revolting Christian militia in 1638 ( Shimabara uprising ), repeatedly encouraged his son to become a samurai . At the age of nine, Tsunetomo was appointed a junior squire in the service of Nabeshima Mitsushige, the second prince of the Nabeshima clan. Due to his literary talent, he rose to the scribe Mitsushiges at the age of nineteen. Shortly afterwards he was released and returned to Edo as a clerk . Unsettled, he sought the advice of the Zen master Tannen, whose view is reflected in Tsunetomo's view of the degenerate society and emptiness of the world.
When Tsunetomos prince Mitsushige died (around 1700), he wanted to follow this with seppuku (traditional suicide), but this was expressly forbidden by the prince before his death. He decided to become a monk and retired to a hermitage near Kurotsuchibara, a few kilometers from the clan's property. The man Tashiro Tsuramoto met him in the monastery and was deeply impressed by Tsunetomo's work. He summarized Tsunetomo's anecdotes in an eleven-volume work. Tsunetomo ordered all original volumes to be burned. However, there were hand-copied versions among the youth of the Saga clan, which then quickly spread. Yamamoto Tsunetomo died in 1719.
Works
- Tsunetomo Yamamoto: Hagakure. The Way of the Samurai. translated by Takao Mukoh. Hokuseido Press (Reprint), Tokyo 2002, ISBN 3-8311-1530-3 .
- ders .: Hagakure. The way of the samurai. (from the English by Guido Keller) Angkor Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999/2012 (new edition), ISBN 978-3-936018-27-1 .
- ders: Hagakure , translated by Wolfgang Höhn and Mariko Sakai. Munich 2005, ISBN 3-442-33732-1 .
- Yamamoto Jōchō: Hagakure. Compilation by Tsuramoto Tashiro. Translated from Japanese, provided with an introduction and commented on by Max Seinsch. With 15 colored woodcuts by Kuniyoshi Utagawa. Reclam, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-15-010694-5 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Yamamoto Tsunetomo in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Yamamoto, Tsunetomo |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 山 本 常 朝 (Japanese) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese samurai and author of Hagakure |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 11, 1659 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Saga, Japan |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 30, 1719 |