Nanao sakaki biography of barack

Who was Nanao Sakaki? More than a decade after his death, that question is not easy to answer — mostly because he was a little bit of everything, all the while refusing to be anything. A Zen master, a wandering philosopher, a Beat poet, a counter-cultural leader, an unrelenting environmentalist and a passionate traveler — these are just some of the designations that have been given him throughout his long life.

Born in into a rigid, militaristic Japan, he joined the army at an early age, which was a common course for the young men at the time. During the Second World War he worked as a radar technician stationed on the island of Kyushu, where he would spend his days cooped up in a concrete bunker, staring at radar screens. All the while, his urge to be outdoors and roam wide open spaces, as well as the first tenets of his anti-establishment sentiment, were brewing inside him.

After the war, Nanao Sakaki went to Tokio and found a job in the publishing industry. However, after a year he decided that it was not the kind of life he wanted for himself. He quit his job and started living on the street as a homeless person. That is when his obsession with walking started. He spent his days walking all around Tokio, which back then was already one of the largest cities in the world.

Then he started going out of town and walking to the nearby towns and cities, and then farther and farther.

A Reader Comments.

He traveled extensively all over Japan, often on foot, until he found a small island of Suwanosejima, where he decided to start a farming commune based on the idea of rural life far from the materialistic world that he left behind. He and his small counter-cultural commune, known in the West as the Tribe , came to prominence when the government decided to build the airport on their island; they protested, wrote poems about the environmental destruction of Japan, held rallies and even went to San Francisco to find international support for their activism, mostly thanks to Gary Snider, American poet fascinated with Japanese culture, who introduced Nanao to Allen Ginsberg and other poets from the American Beat circle.

They invited Nanao Sakaki to visit America, where he spent around ten years in total, mostly in California and New Mexico. In this period, Nanao did exactly what he used to do in Japan before that: he lived freely, homeless and jobless, relying on the hospitality of his friends, writing poetry — and walking. He is reported to have walked from California to New York and back, and even all the way up to Alaska, but as he was mostly on his own and did not like to discuss how he spent his time, these accounts are impossible to verify.