Jūkichi Yagi Comments

Born in what is now part of the city of Machida near Tokyo, Jūkichi Yagi (1898–1927) was a Japanese poet active in the late Taishō period and for the first few years of the Shōwa period, who focused on modern religious themes.

His wife, Tomiko, remarried Hideo Yoshino, a tanka poet (who was himself a tuberculosis patient and a widower) . Tomiko, with the help of Yoshino, drew up the complete inventory of all the unpublished manuscripts by her late husband and published 'The Complete Poems of Jūkichi Yagi' (1959) .

In 1928 Jūkichi's second book, 'Poor Believers', which comprised of poems he had selected before his death, was published.

In 1925 his first book, 'Autumn's Eye', was published. Jūkichi then joined a poetry group in Tokyo and started contributing his poems to several magazines. But it did last just one year: he developed tuberculosis in 1926 and became bed-ridden until his death in 1927, at the age of 29.

Born in 1898 in the outskirts of Tokyo, while in high school, Jūkichi started reading the Bible and soon became a devout Christian. At the age of 23, he was assigned to the Normal School in Hyogo Prefecture as an English teacher: there he started writing poetry prolifically – but only as the expression of his Christian belief.