Tanaka Kōtarō was born on October 25, 1890 in Kagoshima where his father Tanaka Hideo was employed as a judge. Kagoshima was Hideo’s first posting as a judge right after law school. His neighbors threw a big party for him, and his eye fell on a beautiful young girl, the only daughter of the headman of a nearby village, and he soon married Iimori Miku. When Miku gave birth to Kōtarō, one of the friends who came to see the infant was Yamada Saburō (later professor of law at the Imperial University of Tokyo and President of the Japan Academy). Yamada picked up the infant Kōtarō and said, “If I ever become a university professor, I will teach this child” (Tanaka 1961, p. 9). And that is exactly what happened. Yamada looked after young Tanaka from the time he came to Tokyo to study at First Higher School until he graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo. He also accompanied Tanaka on his first trip to Europe, influenced his theory of world law , and—even at the ripe age of ninety years old—is believed to have influenced Tanaka’s election to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Indeed, Yamada Saburō lived a long life. Born in 1869, he died in 1965, just nine years before Tanaka died. He was a long and consistent globalist influence on Tanaka Kōtarō throughout his life.
Following his father’s postings, Kōtarō then moved around the country, living in Nagoya, Matsue, Okayama, Niigata and Fukuoka. Kōtarō’s earliest memories were of Nagoya where the family lived from 1892 to 1899, and those memories were suffused with globalist influences. They include the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the introduction of electric trams. He saw a Chinese prisoner of war in Kenchūji Temple caged like a bird. People came to stare at the prisoner as if he were a circus freak. Tanaka said he never forgot the friendly smile that the Chinese prisoner gave him (Tanaka 1961, p. 10). In 1900 the Tanaka family moved to the remote country town of Matsue. They were only in Matsue for one year, before moving on to Okayama. Tanaka recalled making part of the trip, from Yonago to Tsuyama, by rickshaw. In Okayama, he finished his last year and a half of the prewar system of four years of ordinary elementary school and two years of the higher elementary school and started his first year at Okayama Middle School. Tanaka was a sickly child, but his mother was inspired when she read that Victor Hugo also had been a sickly child but, because of his mother’s great care, he lived to be eighty three. Tanaka had to memorize the Confucian classic On Filial Piety and his father lectured him on The Analects and Mencius. In addition to Confucianism, his father was also attracted to Christianity, and referred to the Creator [zōbutsusha] and “the God that sees us even if we don’t see Him” (Tanaka 1961, p. 12). Tanaka recalled his father as a “progressive,” “enlightened” man who enjoyed the company of Christian missionaries. His mother learned Western cooking and introduced it to her friends. He called his parents “pioneers in the rural Movement to Improve Life” (Tanaka 1961, p. 12).
Tanaka moved from Okayama to Niigata and then back home to Kyushu where he was enrolled as a fourth year student in the Shūyūkan Middle School in Fukuoka City. It was a unique school, not only because of its two hundred year history which stretched back to its founding in 1784 by Kuroda Naritaka, a descendant of the Catholic prince Simeon Kuroda Kanbei (Yoshitaka). It was also unique because, decades before Tanaka enrolled, its curriculum already was exclusively conducted in the English language with a heavy emphasis on English and American literature and history. Tanaka was far and away the best student in his class, particularly in English, in large part because his father employed an American missionary to tutor him and Tanaka himself often stayed up all night studying (Abe 2006, p. 16). The fact that Tanaka studied at a rare all-English middle school would prove to be a major factor in his globalism for the rest of his life. In his fifth year of middle school, Tanaka worked hard to prepare for entrance exams to a higher school. He studied English grammar based on the famous Nannichi Tsunetarō’s Method for Interpreting English Composition (1905). Nannichi, then a professor at Gakushūin University was, along with Kanda Naibu , the leader of English language instruction in the Meiji period and thus one of the early globalist influences in Japanese education.
Yet, because he was a student at a provincial school, Tanaka did not feel confident about his chances of pursuing higher education in Tokyo. At Shūyūkan in his day, there was “Imperial Navy fever” and Tanaka along with his classmates thought the midshipmen at Etajima Naval Academy cut a smart figure with their white jackets and side arms. But there was also a kind of incipient globalism already in Tanaka’s thinking: he knew that the Imperial Navy would give him a chance to experience life in a foreign country. He wasn’t worried about making the grade academically, but he was worried he wouldn’t pass the physical examination. So he applied both to First Higher School and Etajima Naval Academy, with First Higher School as his second choice. His father prepared him for leaving home by citing from Hamlet Polonius’s words to his son Laertes as he left for France (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man”). It does not appear that his father sent spies to keep an eye on his son, as Polonius did. His mother’s advice to her parting son was to remember that chastity is not just for women but also important for men. He had already been educated in sexual matters by his father, mainly about venereal disease. But he saw his mother’s more spiritual advice as clearly rooted in Christian teaching on the virtue of chastity for both men and women (Tanaka 1961, pp. 16–17). It was not a common idea in the Japan of that time.
In 1908 Tanaka graduated from Shūyūkan Middle School . When studying for the First Higher School entrance exam with former classmates from Niigata and Fukuoka, he had to serve as translator for his friends, given the strength of regional dialects back then. Tanaka said that since he himself didn’t speak any dialect—due to his family moving around the country so often—this linguistic fact made him inclined to be a quiet listener rather than a talker. It also encouraged him to think of himself as a cosmopolitan who wasn’t completely at home in the Japanese language (Tanaka 1961, p. 13). He was accepted at both Etajima and First Higher School , earning the second highest score on the First Higher School entrance exam. On his father’s recommendation, he chose First Higher School . Tanaka saw this moment as an important watershed in his life. He later told his cousin Matsui Keiichi that, had he entered Etajima and become a naval officer, he was certain he would not have enjoyed the success in the military that he had in the law, and at any rate would likely have been killed in the Second World War (Matsui 1975, p. 19). The decision in favor of Japan’s most prestigious higher school also took him deeper into the world of cosmopolitan ideas.
In fall of 1908, Tanaka entered First Higher School in Tokyo, specializing in the German Law program. Tanaka reflected that First Higher School , often criticized for being elite or undemocratic, was actually the most successful example of true education in the history of modern Japan. What made First Higher School a special place in his eyes were teachers who taught through art and scholarship the meaning of life and demonstrated it through their own character and cultivated the same in those students who received their personal guidance. Tanaka remembered it as an academic environment where students asked not “what job shall I take when I graduate?” but “what kind of life is worth living?” (Tanaka 1961, pp. 18–19).
The general cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the prewar First Higher School is known in Japanese as kyōyōshugi , a term that refers to a particular form of moral culturalism in education that was heavily tinged with globalist culture. A leader in education based on this kyōyōshugi was First Higher School’s principal, the Christian Nitobe Inazō . At the welcoming reception for new students, Nitobe told them “not to build walls around themselves but think boldly and work to cultivate their character” (Nitobe Inazō , quoted in Tsutsui 2009; cited in Araki 2012, p. 104.) Tanaka himself was not strongly influenced personally by Nitobe. But he was “deeply moved by the passion of Mr. Nitobe when he lectured on the books he loved so much” (Tanaka 1961, pp. 19–20; also cited in Araki 2012, p. 104). The main intellectual influences on Tanaka during these years were from the famous writers Abe Jirō , Abe Yoshishige , and Uozumi Setsuro (Doak 2011, p. 65). The first two are fairly well-known liberals, both influenced greatly by Western thought and Christianity. Uozumi is less known. His influence on Tanaka can be surmised from the following description of wha...