EARLY LIFE

TANAKA HOZUMI WAS born on the 17 February 1876, as the eldest son of Shūnosuke and Yū in Senryū village, now part of Nagano city. Shūnosuke was the village headman, as his forebears had been, and a large landowner; Yū was a daughter of a samurai patriarch whose residence had served as an inn for feudal lords, government officials and high-ranking messengers, aristocrats and head priests of the royal temples when travelling. The birth of Hozumi was especially welcomed because Shūnosuke and Yū's first three children had been girls. The Tanakas were well-off, with a manor house employing farmhands, boy servants, maidservants and a nursemaid, but Shūnosuke, in contrast to Hozumi's grandfather, Onoemon, who wasted some of the family fortune through bad investments, was a more dependable realist, re-solidifying the financial foundations of the family's fortune. Hozumi is said to have inherited his father's realist character, but was a sickly child, so that his mother had to make regular visits to a shrine to pray for her son's recovery from various forms of illness, as well as frequently to send for a doctor for treatment.

At the age of thirteen, Tanaka entered middle school in Matsumoto, about 50 kilometres west of his hometown, because that was the only middle school in the prefecture at that time. He started living on his own in a house as a boarder. However, three years later, his lung-disease forced him to leave school and left him with no choice but to recuperate at home. He was eventually diagnosed as suffering from a parasitic infection caused by a local form of lung fluke and this disease afflicted him during his entire life. Being unable to continue his formal education, he had to live with his family away from school, and it was only when his condition improved that he began to hunt as a form of physical exercise, and to help in his father’s business.

During his convalescence Tanaka began the correspondence course offered by Waseda University. He subscribed to the collections of lectures published by Waseda University Press and completed the course in a few years as an extramural student.