Great figures who went through “The weight of leading”

Figures who went through this

• Date Masamune — The Man Who Played Tough to the End

  "If you make a statue of me after I die, make both eyes right." Ashamed of his one blind eye, this man sent a robe to the mother who is said to have poisoned him. When his head was on the line, he brought up that eye himself. The last thing he left his daughter was a reply that stopped after one line.

• 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.

• Hitomi Kinue — Aloof? I Never Could Be

  "When I lose, what kind of face will the people of Japan have when they look at me?" At nineteen, setting out alone for Sweden, that was what frightened her most. The story of the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic medal, who could never stay aloof.

• 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?

• 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.

• Ninomiya Sontoku — The Man Who Won It Back and Let It Go

  "You have no house. You have no fields." His uncle scolded him, and the boy, the story goes, covered his lamp with his robe and kept on reading. The fields he spent seventeen years buying back, he sold off with his own hands. The man known for the statue of a boy carrying firewood, and the life the statue leaves out.

• 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.