Yoshikawa Views

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He was born Hidetsugu Yoshikawa (吉川英次, Yoshikawa Hidetsugu?) in Kanagawa Prefecture, in what is now a part of Yokohama. Because of his father's failed business, he had to drop out of primary school to work when he was 11 years old. When he was 18, after a near-fatal accident working at the Yokohama docks, he moved to Tokyo and became an apprentice in a gold lacquer workshop. Around this time he became interested in comic haiku. He joined a poetry society and started writing comic haiku under the pseudonym Kijiro.

He married Yasu Akazawa in 1923, the year of the Great Kantō earthquake. His experiences in the earthquake strengthened his resolve to make writing his career. In the following years he published stories in various periodicals published by Kodansha, who recognized him as their number one author. He used 19 pen names before settling on Eiji Yoshikawa. He first used this pen name with the serialization of Sword Trouble, Woman Trouble. His name became a household word after Secret Record of Naruto was serialized in the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun. From then on the public's appetite for his brand of adventure writing was insatiable.

A 1933 graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima (graduating at the top of his class), Yoshikawa served briefly at sea aboard the armored cruiser Asama as well as submarines and had begun training as a naval pilot near the end of 1934 when a severe stomach ailment prevented him from completing his training. He was subsequently discharged from the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1936. As a result, he briefly contemplated suicide.[1]

A year later he began a career in Naval intelligence, being assigned to Navy Headquarters in Tokyo. He became an expert in the U.S. Navy, perusing through every source he could possibly get his hands on. While on intelligence duty he intercepted a shortwave radio message in plain English that 17 troop transports were en route to England, having cleared the port of Freetown. He passed this information to the German Embassy, and many of the ships were destroyed as a result. Yoshikawa subsequently received a personal letter of thanks from Adolf Hitler.[2] In 1940 he became a junior diplomat after passing the Foreign Ministry English examinations.