Nanao Sakaki

Who was Nanao Sakaki?

Nanao Sakaki was a Japanese poet, author of Bellyfulls and leading personality of the Tribe. He was born to a large family in the Kagoshima Prefecture, and raised by parents who ran an indigo dye-house.

After completing compulsory education to age twelve, he worked as an office boy in Kagoshima. He was a draftee radar specialist stationed in Kyushu in the Japanese Air Force or Navy, and surreptitiously read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kropotkin, Marx, and Engels as time allowed. After the war, he went to Tokyo, living in an underpass near Ueno Station, working for a short time at a foundry in Amagasaki, then as a turner, and then for some two and a half years running errands for Sanehiko Yamamoto's office.

Around 1952-3 he moved to the San'ya district and lived off the generosity of his neighbors, spending all his time studying English and reading. After two years there, he moved to Shinjuku, became interested in primitive art, and collaborated with a wood sculptor. They visited forests all over Japan for some three years. During this time, Sakaki began to write poems expressing a deep relationship with the forests. This led to exhibitions combining poetry and sculpture in Kagoshima in 1955 and in Ikebukuro in 1959.