Soichi Yamashita

Birthday: May 25, 1936

Soichi Yamashita was a Japanese farmer and writer. When his farm work of the day was done and everyone in his family was asleep, he would read works by Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) and philosophize about farm villages and agriculture. Yamashita attempted twice, after finishing junior high school, to run away from home out of his resentment for his father. He still took over the family farm, however, and fantasized about modernizing the farm village. He said the only things that exist are the rice paddies and farms, the mountains, his family and the farm village before his eyes, and they all have values that are intrinsically at odds with modernization and a market economy.