Great figures who went through “Too stubborn”

Figures who went through this

• 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?

• Hirooka Asako — The Woman Who Never Leaned on Anyone

  At about twelve, she was forbidden to read. She held up the house she married into, went down into a coal mine, and joined the people building a university for women. On Christmas Day at sixty-two, she asked to be placed among the children being baptized.

• Kano Jigoro — The Man Who Never Said "I'm Tired"

  "How do you do that move?" Every time he asked, the young man got thrown instead of answered. He was small, hated losing, and left the whole household to his wife. Even on a ship at seventy-seven, it is said, he answered that it did not hurt. The life of the father of judo.

• Kitasato Shibasaburo — The Man Who Wouldn't Listen

  "Being a doctor or a monk is no work for a grown man with arms and legs." That, it is said, was how a young man felt when he entered a medical school only as a trick. Later he snapped at his bosses, cut down his own teacher's theory, and quit with all his staff when his institute was moved to a government office. What was the one piece of advice this man who never listened finally kept?

• Kukai (Kobo Daishi) — The Man Who Won Too Well with Words

  At twenty-four, he described his own stand-in as a monk with a head like a copper bowl and a face like a clay pot. With words he beat his relatives, moved foreign officials, and lost his closest friend. The stubborn, clumsy life of the man later called Kobo Daishi.

• Masaoka Shiki — The Greedy Invalid

  "My sickbed of six feet: this is my world." He sent his friend the bill for the eel, was turned down by the pupil he chose, and screamed when it hurt. Even so, five days before he died, he looked at his garden that morning and cheered on a natto seller. The story of a greedy haiku poet.

• Miyamoto Musashi — The Master Who Never Met His Time

  "I did not win because I had mastered the art of fighting." The man who never lost wrote this at sixty. He never served any lord, was laughed at by a child for being a coward, and failed at a painting in front of his lord. The proud, bluffing life of a swordsman.

• Murasaki Shikibu — The Woman Who Wouldn't Write Even "One"

  "I do not even write the character for 'one.'" The woman who wrote that also wrote a very long story. Her father sighed over her, the court gossiped about her, and in the end she put everything she had hidden into one letter and asked: "When you have read it, please send it right back." This is her story.

• 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.