Author Guide · 2026-05-04 · Reading time ~ 7 min
Takamura Kōun — Start with a Twelve-Year-Old's Crossroads
Father of poet Takamura Kōtarō and master sculptor of Meiji Japan. One memoir piece on Pagera opens the warmest record of old Tokyo's downtown.
Pagera Editorial
Takamura Kōun (高村光雲, 1852–1934) is not a name that travels easily beyond Japan. But the son's name sometimes does: the poet Takamura Kōtarō, whose love-poem cycle Chieko-shō remains one of the most read collections of modern Japanese poetry. The father was a sculptor. Specifically, the sculptor who carved the bronze Saigō Takamori in Ueno Park and the seated macaque Rōen — two of the most recognizable works of Meiji-era Japanese sculpture.
Kōun was also something rarer: the most detailed chronicler of the artisan world of early Meiji Tokyo. In 1929, in his late seventies, he began publishing a long memoir series called Bakumatsu Ishin Kaikōdan — "Recollections of the Bakumatsu and Meiji Restoration Period." More than a hundred installments. Written in the formal, unhurried register of an old craftsman looking back across sixty years.
The piece on Pagera: a barber's act of kindness
The first piece available in Korean translation on Pagera is the third installment of the series: "The Story of Yas-san at the Yasudoko Barbershop."
The year is Bunkyū 3 (1863), five years before the Meiji Restoration, when Tokyo was still called Edo. The narrator is twelve years old. He is about to be apprenticed to a carpenter. A barber in the neighborhood — middle-aged, easygoing, the kind of man everyone calls Yas-san — takes it upon himself to redirect the boy's future. He knows a master woodcarver who would suit the child better. He arranges the introduction. One conversation at the barbershop changes everything.
The story does not dramatize this. Kōun recounts it in a measured, courteous tone — the register of an elderly craftsman who has long since processed his surprise at how a life can turn on such small pivots. What stays with the reader is the warmth of the detail: Yas-san's careful, deferential speech; the boy's nervous conversation with his father; the first visit to the carver's house. And the closing note — that Kōun, even after achieving fame, never stopped making offerings in memory of Yas-san. "The course of my whole life seems to have been settled by that man's arrangement."
What the memoir records
Bunkyū 3 is 1863. The artisan world Kōun describes — barbers, carpenters, and woodcarvers living as neighbors in the same downtown district — predates the Meiji reorganization of labor and profession. The apprenticeship system was still the architecture of a working life. The neighborhood names Kōun mentions (Asakusa, Hatchobori, Inaricho) still exist in Tokyo. The system they contained has not.
Kōun writes without nostalgia and without theory. He simply reports what happened. That plainness is what makes the memoir valuable as a historical document. No other source on the artisan world of late-Edo and early-Meiji Tokyo is as granular or as warm.
The full series runs to over a hundred installments. The Korean translation on Pagera currently covers this one piece. Further translations are in preparation. If you would like to see a specific installment translated sooner, the translation request page lets you submit a title directly.