, also known as Ryūmei Yoshimoto, was a Japanese poet, philosopher, and literary critic. As a philosopher, he is remembered as a founding figure in the emergence of the New Left in Japan, and as a critic, he was at the forefront of a movement to force writers to confront their responsibility as wartime collaborators. Yoshimoto is the father of Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto and of cartoonist Yoiko Haruno. Early life Yoshimoto was born in 1924, in Tsukishima, Tokyo, the third son of family of boatmakers who managed a small boatyard. Shortly before his birth, his family had moved to Tokyo from Amakusa, Kumamoto prefecture, on the southern island of Kyushu. In his teens, Yoshimoto came under the influence of literature while receiving private tutoring, and began to write poetry. He was influenced by the work of Takamura Kōtarō and Miyazawa Kenji. He was a 'militarist youth' during the war, but experienced the end of the war while mobilized for manual labor, and thereon became fascinated by Marxism. Yoshimoto attended Tashima Elementary School in the Kyobashi Ward of Tokyo, Yonezawa Engineering School (Now Yamagata University), and graduated in 1947 from the Engineering Division of Tokyo Institute of Technology with a degree in Electrochemistry. During his studies, he became acquainted with the Mathematician Toyama Hiraku. After graduation, Yoshimoto moved to industry, became a research student in 1950, and in 1952 took a position at Tokyo Ink Manufacturing Company Ltd. He continued his poetic output, writing his first representative works, Dialogue with Particularity and Ten Works for a Change in Position, and won the Arechi prize for new poets. He published a work of criticism on Takamura Kōtarō. As a father figure to the New Left Yoshimoto, who had pursued a theory of war responsibility of the literati, supported the Anpo Protests against the 1960 revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty as an expression of the contradictions of the postwar order fifteen years after the end of the war. Strongly opposing the new treaty, he became an "enthusiastic supporter" and "patron saint" of the Zengakuren student activists. Yoshimoto was invited to give speeches at Zengakuren meetings in December 1959 and January 1960, and he joined the student activists in a sit-in at Shinagawa Station in Tokyo as part of a nationwide general strike against the Treaty on June 4, 1960. On June 15, 1960, at the climax of the protests, he joined