One morning, I spit up two cups of blood. I didn’t know the reason, but I had no money to see a doctor. Being at a loss as to what to do, I realized that the Ishikawa family, who ran a rice shop in Kyōbashi, could help me. I remembered my mother having mentioned them to me. At any rate, I visited them and explained my situation. At once, the Ishikawas, distant relatives of ours, spirited me off to their family doctor. My examination showed no signs of illness. I was sick due to my extremely unhealthy diet. I was told, from that day on, to eat primarily vegetables.

In Tokyo at that time, on my budget, it was very difficult for me to get vegetables, with even a single leek costing two sen. Thanks to the sincere kindness of the Ishikawa family, I was allowed to stay with them while I was in school. However, I couldn’t afford the train fare like the other students, so in the morning, I walked from Kyōbashi to school in Hongō Higashitake-cho, and in the evening to Kudanzakashita for night school. My school commute took an extremely long time, so after having taken advantage of my three-month respite and recovery with the Ishikawas, I went back to my old second floor accommodations and started cooking for myself. However, with my funds running low, I couldn’t make my monthly tuition payment, so I was told not to come to school for a while.

In those days, the tuition would have been affordable for a landlord, who was the top or the second owner in the village, but if middle class landowners were to let their children study in Tokyo, it wasn’t at all unusual for them to sell two or three tan(2,000-3,000m²) of rice field to acquire the money for tuition. There, among the talented youth who embraced the nebulous ambitions that had brought them to Tokyo, of course there were those who would have to earn the means to pay for school themselves. In those days, they would come to be called “self-supporting students”.

We got up early in the morning, doing jobs like selling and delivering newspapers, delivering milk, selling natto, and so on. Other things like hawking newspaper extras, pulling carts, manning street stalls, pulling rickshaw… those were the main menial jobs we occupied. Slightly more comfortable were night school students earning room and board doing domestic work at the houses of lawyers, doctors, and members of the House of Representatives.

In spite of their appearance, wearing shabby clothes and old hats and sporting unshaven faces, every one of them driven by great ambition — often spiritedly arguing about the state of the world and lamenting their situation — they were nonetheless able to act with freedom and without fear or ill will toward society. People accepted them for their warm heartedness without seeing them as objects of sympathy. In those days, many moving tales appeared in the pages of the newspaper. There were facilities made available for self-supporting students and offers of support from obscure sources for those students with auspicious results — stories of them being wed to wealthy daughters or earning the right to take over the family deed. As for the students themselves, having helped others in need and having been rewarded, they repaid their families. Most of the working students at that time were very well behaved. However, being both generous and dynamic, they were also driven by spirited emotions, so there was a difference between the student culture and that of the age. It seemed a very special time, but they were just college boys.