Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Scribe in the service of lord Nabeshima Mitsushige and later a Zen priest, whose thoughts were recorded by Tashiro Tsuramoto and published in 1716 as Hagakure.
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Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a Japanese scribe in the service of the Nabeshima clan and later a Zen priest, whose thoughts were published in 1716 as Hagakure. He was born on 11 June 1659 by the Japanese calendar (30 July by today's) in Katada Yokokoji in the Saga domain in Hizen province. He died in Okoguma in the Saga domain; some sources give 30 November 1719, others 21 November 1719. His father Yamamoto Jin'emon was 71 years old at his son's birth.
At the age of nine he entered the service of lord Nabeshima Mitsushige as a page, in 1678 he underwent the genpuku coming-of-age ceremony, and in 1682 he obtained the post of library scribe. He served in Edo and from 1686 in Kyoto; in 1687 he resigned after his nephew took responsibility for a devastating fire. He studied Zen under the priest Tannen and Confucianism under Ishida Ittei.
After lord Mitsushige's death on 16 May 1700, the ban on junshi forbade him to follow his lord into death, so at the age of 42 he asked to enter a monastery. He became a Zen priest with the monastic name Yamamoto Jocho and lived in a hermitage.
He dictated his thoughts to the samurai Tashiro Tsuramoto; some sources place the dictation in the years 1709–1716, others state that Tashiro first visited him on 5 March 1710. Tashiro completed 11 volumes on 10 September 1716 under the title Hagakure (葉隠), that is, "in the shadow of leaves" or "hidden leaves". The work remained little known until the 1930s, and in the period of militarism soldiers then accepted it as a text on samurai conduct.