Saneyuki Akiyama, the tactician who criticized the Yamato spirit

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Shiba's preference for rationalists can be seen in the three main characters of "Clouds Above the Hill": the brothers Akiyama Yoshifuru and Saneyuki, and Masaoka Shiki.

Akiyama Yoshifuru was an army officer and was called the father of Japanese cavalry. Cavalry is a dashing and stylish force, but in fact it is quite difficult to use cavalry on the battlefield. For example, in the fall and winter in Manchuria, the ground is often frosty or frozen, making it difficult to gallop on horseback. Therefore, even though Yoshifuru was a cavalry commander, he did not hesitate to have his soldiers dismount from their horses and fight. In the Russo-Japanese War, he demonstrated this rational decision-making at every turn, and with only 8,000 cavalry, he was able to withstand the onslaught of 100,000 Cossack cavalry, the strongest in the world at the time.

His younger brother, Saneyuki, was also a paragon of rationalism. He fought in the Russo-Japanese War as an aide to Togo Heihachiro, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, and devised the famous T-shaped operation remove background image in the Battle of Tsushima. As a rare tactician, one can imagine that he was a realist, but Akiyama Saneyuki criticized the irrational spirit of Yamato spirit when he told Takarabe Takeo, who was from Satsuma, "When you Satsuma people face an emergency, you immediately bring out the Yamato spirit."

The military brothers Akiyama and the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki may seem like very different people, but Shiki was also a man of realism who believed in "seeing reality as it is."

"When you eat a persimmon, the bell at Horyuji Temple rings."

Many people may wonder why this poem, the most famous of Shiki's works, is regarded as a masterpiece.

In fact, from the Manyoshu until Shiki appeared, there were hardly any poems about persimmons. Persimmons are valuable as a preserved food, so in the olden days, every home had a persimmon tree. Persimmons, which are an everyday part of life, were not recognized as an object of beauty in the world of poetry for a long time. During the Manyo period, the first flower to become an object of beauty was the bush clover flower. Miyagino is a specialty area for bush clover. When a local official who was posted to Mutsu brought back bush clover as a souvenir, the people of the capital were fascinated by it and wrote poems about it. The next most commonly written about flower was the plum blossom, an imported product of Chinese civilization. At the time, cherry blossoms were not considered an object of beauty because they were an everyday flower that could be seen everywhere.