Makino Tomitaro — The Man Who Spared Nothing

Seita Is a Handful

"Seize all you like."

A court officer would come to take the family's belongings. Each time, he did not care at all. That was how he felt inside, and he sat at a desk close by, writing an article about plants. He wrote this himself, years later.

This was Makino Tomitaro, a man who studied plants at a university in Tokyo. His pay was not even enough to feed his family.

But he began as the only son of a family that never had to worry about money.

He was born on May 22, 1862 (April 24 by the old lunar calendar). The place was Sakawa, a town in the mountains of Tosa, now Kochi, on the island of Shikoku. His family was an old one, and ran a sake brewery and a shop selling small goods.

Before he could remember anything, both his father and his mother died of illness. He did not remember their faces.

"I do not know the taste of a parent."

That is one line from his autobiography, written years later. His grandmother raised him as the precious only child who would take over the sake shop.

One day, the shop's head clerk bought a clock, which was very rare in those days.

The boy was dying to see what was inside. He took the clock apart and studied it until he was satisfied.

"Seita is a real handful."

Everyone said so, the autobiography says. Seitaro was his name as a small child, and people called him Seita.

There were other odd things about him. He was the heir to a sake shop, but he disliked sake from birth and did not drink even as a child. He did not smoke either.

In 1874, an elementary school opened in town, and he entered it. But after about two years, he quit on his own.

"I cannot say now why I came to hate it."

That is all he later said about it. His family ran a sake shop. He had no thought at all of making his way through learning.

Even so, when the school he had quit asked him to become a teacher, he accepted. The post was assistant teacher, and the pay was three yen a month.

What he loved was plants. He would climb the hill behind the shrine at the back of his house, and pick plants or just look at them.

If his father had lived long, he would surely have been made to sit at the shop's counter and grow old there. Because no one told him what to do, he could study plants alone, as he pleased. He looked back on it this way later.

One day, while he was playing in the hills, his best friend Horimi Katsuhiro came running.

"The Jutei Keimo has come!"

It was the book he had been waiting for. It was Honzo Komoku Keimo, by Ono Ranzan, a scholar of the Edo period (the age before modern Japan), full of the names and shapes of many plants. He had been copying out a borrowed handwritten copy, but it took too long, so he had asked a shop to order the book for him.

He ran down the mountain in a rush and hurried to the shop. He was as happy as if he had taken a demon's head, the autobiography says. After that, from morning to night, he kept turning its pages.

If he found a plant with white flowers on the mountain, he looked it up in the book. The next day he climbed the mountain again and checked the book against the real plant. That is how he learned the names of plants, one by one.

In April 1881, at eighteen, he set out for Tokyo for the first time, to buy books and a microscope.

For a person from Tosa then, going to Tokyo was like going abroad. He got a grand send-off and boarded a ship. Seeing the mountains of Kobe, he wondered if they were covered with snow, but they were bare hills with no trees.

In Tokyo he bought books at a bookshop and a microscope at an instrument shop. On the way home, he climbed Mount Ibuki alone and gathered plants. He wrote that he was dressed in "a kimono that showed him to be a complete country bumpkin."

Back in Sakawa, the Liberal Party, a political party that fought for people's rights, was strong at that time, and he was an eager member. But he did not mean to make his way in politics. He decided to leave the party and throw himself into study.

But he did not leave quietly. He asked a dyer to make a flag showing monsters running away, burned by fire. When the party held a big get-together on the banks of the Niyodo River, he rolled up the flag, went in with fifteen or sixteen friends, and, in the middle of a speaker's fiery speech, suddenly held the flag out. Then he left the hall singing loudly.

If he was going to leave, he had to make a show of spirit, he thought, the autobiography says.

Around that time, at home, he wrote a piece. Its title was "Shabei Ittatsu." It was a list of what a person who aims to study plants must know.

Patience is needed. Precision is needed. One must read Western books. One must draw the pictures oneself. Whoever studies plants, great or small, must have a botanical garden of his own.

Among them is this line.

"One who begrudges money cannot be a plant scientist."

Books and instruments cannot be had without money. So a person who begrudges money cannot become a plant scientist.

He wrote it when he was barely twenty. At that time, he wrote, he was "well fed and warmly dressed," with no hardship of any kind. More than sixty years later, he added this note and printed the piece without changing a single character.

Don't Come to the Classroom

In 1884, Tomitaro went to Tokyo once more. This time, it was to study.

He lodged in Iidamachi. His room was always a mess of plants he had gathered, newspapers, and mud. "Makino's room is like a tanuki's den," people often said, he wrote. (A tanuki is a wild raccoon dog that lives in burrows.)

He did not enter any school. He had left even elementary school partway, and it stayed that way.

The place where that man began to go was the plant science classroom of Tokyo University. At the time, the building was called the "Blue Long House."

The teachers there, Yatabe Ryokichi and Matsumura Jinzo, welcomed him warmly: a man who was so keen on plants had come out of the deep mountains of Shikoku. He could look at the classroom's books and specimens freely. Though he was not a student, they treated him just like one, he looked back.

He went to the classroom almost every day, and he thought. Japan still had no single, complete book about its plants. He would make one himself. He could draw the pictures. But he did not know how to print them. So he went for about a year to a small stone-printing shop in Kanda (lithography, printing from a flat stone), and learned the printing craft.

He asked the owner of that shop for one more favor.

On his way to the university, he always passed a small sweet shop. He had fallen for the daughter of the shop. Her name was Sue. She was eleven years younger than he was.

The family once lived in a large mansion, and Sue is said to have taken lessons in dance and song as a girl. But when her father died, they lost the mansion and the money. Her mother raised the children by keeping the sweet shop.

According to the autobiography, he asked the owner of the printing shop to act as go-between, and took the girl as his wife.

"You could call her a wife I fell in love with."

That is a line from the autobiography. The two rented a small separate house in Negishi and set up home.

In November 1888, the first volume of Nihon Shokubutsu-shi Zuhen (Illustrated Flora of Japan) came out. He drew every picture himself and had them printed from stone. He paid for everything himself, too.

Matsumura wrote a review in a plant science journal, and praised it highly.

"Today, the only person in the Japanese empire who should write the pictured plant record of this country is Mr. Makino Tomitaro."

The Russian plant scientist Maximovich also praised the pictures highly.

In May 1890, he went out alone to Koiwa in Tokyo to gather willow fruit. In an irrigation pond in the rice fields, something of a shape he had never seen was floating. "What on earth is that?" He scooped it up and carried it back to the classroom, and everyone was astonished, he wrote.

Yatabe looked it up in a book and found its scientific name. It was a rare water plant that eats insects, rare even in the world: the waterwheel plant, mujinamo.

That same year, something happened that he had never expected.

That same Yatabe told him this, the autobiography says.

"I also mean to publish a flora of Japan, separately from you. From now on I refuse to let you see the books or specimens of the classroom."

He went all the way to Yatabe's house in Fujimicho. In Japan, very few people study plants. If he shut one of them out, it would hurt Japanese plant science. He pleaded this, and begged:

"Isn't it a senior's duty to lift up those who come after?"

Yatabe was stubborn and would not listen.

"While I am doing my work, you must not come to the classroom."

He was neither a university staff member nor a student. He could not insist any more than that. He left his teacher's house in low spirits, the autobiography says.

Shut out, he thought of a bold plan. He would go to Russia.

He would take all the specimens he had gathered to Maximovich, the man who had praised his pictures, and help with his work. He had no connections. He explained his situation to the head of the Nikolai Cathedral (the Russian Orthodox church) in Surugadai and asked for help, and the head gladly sent a letter for him.

A reply came. Maximovich had been very glad that Makino was coming. But when the letter arrived, he was in bed with influenza, and soon after, he died. That was the news.

If he had gone, his autobiography would have turned out completely different, he later wrote.

A poem in classical Chinese that he made then still remains.

"In human life, nothing goes as one wishes."

"Heaven and earth are vast, and there is no one who understands me."

Nothing in this world goes the way you want. Heaven and earth stretch on without end, yet nowhere is there anyone who understands me.

Even so, he did not give up. The other side was a professor of the Imperial University, and he was a student with no title. It was like a sumo match between a grand champion and a wrestler in nothing but a loincloth, and the thought roused him. The Zuhen, which had come out every other month, he decided to publish every month.

Where was the money for that coming from?

The money for living, for books, for trips to gather plants, and for publishing, all of it he kept calling in from his home town and spending. It could not last forever, he admits.

In 1891, word came from home. Come back once and settle the family's property.

He returned to Tosa.

And in Tosa, he became wild about something that had nothing to do with plants.