 One fine day in June 1961 I happened to visit the Peony Garden Park in Kitami. While I was enjoying all the beautiful flowers - crimson, pink, white - I came across a memorial stone on a shady path under trees near the main entrance. It was engraved with the following haiku, the script in the original hand-written form: |
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| Beautifully looping through the floral meadow - the Rausu River Donku |
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| "Floral meadow" is a seasonal word for autumn. The author had in mind the Rausu River meandering in great loops across a plain through masses of wild flowers. The expression "looping" suggests the pains the author took in choosing his words. A lovely sunny haiku, evoking just a hint of the sadness of autumn. | |
| With the image fresh in my mind, I asked the owner of the Peony Park, Kawanishi Kiichi, who Donku was. He said the poet's real name was Nashio Ryozo. He was then nearly 80 years old, had been in the confectionery business and had donated money to Kitami City to build a library. | |
| I imagined someone born and raised in a wealthy family, steeped in culture and refinement, his comfortable life drawing to a close. However when I later had the honour of meeting Nashio's grandson, Ryoichiro, I learned that Ryozo's life had been filled with trials and hardship. | |
| He was born at Senba in Osaka in 1883, the second son in a family of paper wholesalers. His father's business failed when Ryozo was two years old. He witnessed the death of his sick mother when he was eight and he and his young brothers carried her casket at the funeral. He had only one year of elementary schooling before he was sent out to work at a used clothing shop. In 1908, at the age of 26, he set out with high hopes for Southern Sakhalin, which had become Japanese territory after the Russo-Japanese War. He was swindled by a rascally agent, forced to toil as a bonded laborer, contracted typhoid fever and finally fled to Hokkaido, barely escaping with his life. | |
| With the small sum of money he had saved from working at a herring factory, he arrived in Nokkeushi (Kitami) on board a work train from Ikeda on the Chihoku line, then being built. Nokkeushi was booming thanks to the peppermint and timber industries. He found a place to live near Ponyu, on the outskirts of the town, and began business as a pedlar - carrying a load of confectionery and dried fish around the pioneer settlements, staying at farms and lumber camps, in frequent danger of encounters with bears. | |
| One winter night he came in to town to replenish his stock. In order to save the one yen cost of lodgings, he found a shed by the Kamimura Transport Company near the station and tried to get some sleep, wrapped up in matting that was used for packing. He was woken by someone from the house next door who gave him a proper bed inside, saying they did not want him to catch cold. He vowed to himself that, though he was then just a poor pedlar, he would repay the kindness handsomely once he had succeeded in business. | |
| When the first bank opened in Nokkeushi in 1913, he walked twenty-four kilometres through the night to be the first person to open an account there. The following year he set up his own shop, with its yamadai trade mark entrance curtain, near the station. | |
| In those days many goods were of poor quality, interest rates on loans were high and being late with payments was common. People who could not meet their debts would often flee during the night. Nashio was determined to be trustworthy in his business relationships. Since wholesalers in Hokkaido did not stock high quality goods at that time, he began dealing directly with manufacturers in Honshu and supplying their wares. He was meticulous about collecting payments. He shared the work with his wife. They would not let snowstorms or distance prevent them from requesting payment on the due date. Such meticulousness astonished people used to more easy going ways, but it was essential in order to maintain his own credit with banks, manufacturers and transport companies. The Nashio business prospered and by 1935 he ranked alongside Itani Hanjiro at the top of the list of tax payers in Nokkeushi. | |
| He devoted himself to haiku as well as to business and in 1966 published "Field of Flowers". | |
| Some of his verses capture the mood of the rough, pioneering days of Hokkaido: | |
| Loading dripping seaweed - Onto the back of a horse. |
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| The man-eating bear - Strung up in front of the town office |
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| But others portray the kind of sophisticated, romantic world associated with the dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon: | |
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A winter moon - Pausing, unsure, on Ebisu Bridge |
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| The doll from the capital - Beautiful, but lacking expression |
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| His haiku reveal a depth of culture and reflect his determined use of scarce leisure time for study. His motive in donating funds to build the library stemmed from his own keenly-felt experience. He wanted to help young people who desired to study but had few opportunities to attend school. His bust stands in the vestibule of the Kitami City Library, eyes shining intensely under bushy eyebrows. | |
| (from the Kitami City Newsletter, May 1988) |