Great figures who went through “Attacked for what I believe”

Figures who went through this

• Fukuzawa Yukichi — The Man Who Pretended to Be Fine

  As a child, he let his head be shaved without crying, because sake was the reward. He grew up resolved never to let joy or anger show, yet to the man who looked after his household accounts and errands, he was someone who let joy and anger show without hiding them. The proud, bluffing life of the man once on Japan's 10,000-yen bill.

• Hiraga Gennai — The Man Who Would Not Be a Retainer

  At a party, nobody could open a bag fastened with a puzzle ring. A man sitting at the lowest seat thought for a while, and opened it. He was offered a fief of two hundred koku, was mocked as a "yamashi," a swindler, and in the end struck down a man for reasons no one knows. His friend carved a question on his grave: why was even his death so far from ordinary?

• Okuma Shigenobu — The Man Who Said He Didn't Mind Losing It

  "The leg I should have cut off decades ago, and I managed to keep it until that day." A man who lost his right leg to a bomb said this. He called being thrown out of school a happiness, said even the illness that nearly killed him was not useless, and said even a lost leg was no great loss. This is the story of his brave front, and of the people who held it up.

• Sakamoto Ryoma — The Man Who Wrote That He Could Not Die

  I'm so lucky that I can't die, he wrote, even in places where people die. The twenty-seven-year-old wrote this to his sister, and in the very next letter he puffed out his chest: "Ahem, ahem." The vain, joke-telling thirty-one years of the man who said he would give Japan a good washing.