Yamamoto Tsunetomo 1659 – 1719

Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a Japanese samurai and philosopher of the early Edo period, a retainer of the Saga domain who, on the death of his lord in 1700, was forbidden by Tokugawa law from following him in death and instead retired to a hermitage to dictate the long oral memoir that became Hagakure, In the Shadow of the Leaves. The Hagakure, a collection of practical and philosophical reflections on the conduct of the samurai, fused Confucian moral seriousness, Zen mindfulness, and an austere poetics of death into one of the founding texts of the philosophical tradition of bushido. Although suppressed by the Edo government during his lifetime, the work shaped Japanese ethical imagination from its eventual publication in the eighteenth century onward.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo was born in Saga in the Hizen domain in June 1659, the son of a senior samurai retainer of the Nabeshima clan. He served from his late teens as personal attendant of the daimyō Nabeshima Mitsushige, rose through the ranks of the clan administration, and was on close terms with the lord throughout his career. When Mitsushige died in 1700 the Tokugawa government had already prohibited junshi, the ritual suicide of a retainer following his lord; forbidden that final service, Tsunetomo took Buddhist tonsure as the priest Jōchō and retired to a hermitage at Kurotsuchibaru outside Saga.

Between 1709 and 1716 the young samurai Tashiro Tsuramoto visited him repeatedly, and his recollections, dictations, and reflections were transcribed as the Hagakure (In the Shadow of Leaves), a collection of some thirteen hundred anecdotes and aphorisms on the Way of the Warrior. The text was kept secret within the Saga domain throughout the Edo period and reached a wider Japanese audience only in the early twentieth century.

Hagakure proposed an austere reading of bushidō centred on the principle that 'the way of the samurai is found in death' — the daily anticipation of one's own death as the condition of freedom and absolute service to one's lord. Marginal in its own time, the work shaped the modern bushidō revival of Inazō Nitobe and was the avowed model of Yukio Mishima's late writing and politics. Tsunetomo died at his hermitage in November 1719.