Sanki ICHIKAWA（市河三喜）
Father of Historical and Related Studies of English in Japan

Takao KAMIYAMA, D. Lit.
Professor of Indo-European/English Historical Linguistics and Phonetics
The Graduate School of Letters
Osaka University

Childhood years (1886–1903)
Born into a traditional literary family in today’s Akihabara area, downtown Tokyo, anddrilled in classical sinology and calligraphy from his early childhood, the young Sanki Ichikawa(1886–1970) was first charmed not by ancient Chinese/Japanese written culture, but by living
creatures and plants. On Sundays the beginning naturalist would walk around Tokyo collecting
plants and insects, especially butterflies, visiting his favorite zoological garden in Ueno and several
museums, and spending literally hours watching living beasts and specimens.
Though his first love lasted his whole life long, Ichikawa was then captured by anotherlove — love for English — which was in fact inspired by his first one. The early teenager was eager
to know a lot more about natural history and dared to challenge specialized books, first in Japanese,then in English. Ichikawa already knew some English then: he started English at ten, tutored by his
brother San’yō (三陽, 1879–1927), seven years his senior, who was destined to give up further study
through fragile health. At school Ichikawa began to learn it two years later. But his English then was,as a matter of course, far from good enough to make out those treatises for specialists.
His love for English blazed up. He kept working on those monographs in English literallyinch by inch all by himself, looking up almost everything in various dictionaries and related books
he could reach. In addition, he did whatever he could to improve his English as soon as possible: heattended Kai-in-gakkan, an after-school English class near by, and a two-month summer course at
Seisoku English School, led by the well-known educator of English, Hidesaburō Saitō (斎藤秀三郎,
1866–1929). On his own he learned thoroughly everything available to brush up his English,
teaching himself other school subjects through extra-textbooks in English he obtained: mathematics,
geology, physics (he read Gauß !) and, needless to say, biology or natural history.
In the meantime, his first and second works in English appeared in the newsletters of theTokyo Ordinary Middle School (continued by the Tokyo First Middle School and then today’s
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Hibiya High School): “Exploration of the Limestone Cave,” a report after visiting Nippara in the far
north-west end of Tokyo prefecture, and “Dearth of Linguistic Knowledge of Our Students,” whichstressed the need to learn English intensively in middle school days, after boldly criticizing bothincompetent (allegedly) teachers of English and university students lacking (again allegedly) in
ambitiousness to improve their linguistic commands. It is clearly seen that Ichikawa took welldeserved pride in what he had done and was totally devoted to English already in his mid-teens.

The First National College (1903–1906)
After finishing the five-year course of middle school, Ichikawa was successfully admitted
to the First National College, which roughly corresponded to the last three years of Gymnasium inGermany and later constituted the liberal arts curriculum of the University of Tokyo. He joined thehumanities course there, i.e. he chose his second love rather than his first one for natural history,
since, as he recalled, he was then worried that his eyesight would not be good enough to lookthrough the microscope to study biology.
Ichikawa spent his college days even more deeply soaked in English. Nine English classes
per week were just a piece of cake. On his own he read and read whatever interested him: ranging
from such heavy literary works as Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Dickens, Swift, Tolstoy (English
version, of course), down to lighter ones like Doyle, and to cross-cultural studies by Noguchi,Blackie, etc., etc. He dared to undertake bizarre “midwinter English self-training,” inspired by
judoists and kendoists, roommates at the dorm, who engaged themselves in early morning training in
the middle of winter. Getting up before dawn, the determined Ichikawa, out on the campus with noone there to listen, would recite at the top of his lungs what he had learned by heart the night before:fragments of Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy, Longfellow’s Evangeline and Hiawatha, Moody’s
Sermons, Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner, Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes and many others.
He was devoted so much that he nearly deteriorated his health. His brother Sanroku (三禄,1890–1938), later professor of Silviculture at Kyoto, left a note before his premature death that theirfather, notable sinologist and master calligrapher Sanken (三兼, 1838–1907), also known by his pen
name Man’an (萬庵), had been really concerned and used to comment that health was no lessprecious than English.
Meanwhile, as he noticed the importance of Christianity in grasping English/European
culture behind language, chiefly affected by Kanzō Uchimura (内村鑑三, 1861–1930), he spent his
first summer holiday of college all alone in his father’s cottage in Mukōjima, eastern rural area ofTokyo then, reading through the English Holy Bible and compiling a glossary of Christianity. Laterhe got baptized. Regular attendance at several Bible classes, conducted by English-speaking priests,
helped him a lot, as he recalled, in improving his listening comprehension.
In his college days Ichikawa had nine hours’ German classes a week. Some professors in2those days were unfortunately not qualified enough to conduct proper classes, but there was nothing
to worry about. A few years before, Ichikawa had started German at home, again tutored by San’yō.
On his own he learned it rapidly, helped by the nice command of English he got by then. He evenmade it a highly demanding rule, shared by several ambitious students, to read through a volume
from the German Reclam paperback series every two weeks !
His love for natural history survived. He spent the next summer holiday on isolated Jeju
Island, to the south-west of Korean Peninsula, assisting a zoological expedition supported by theDuke of Bedford. Though hired basically as an interpreter, Ichikawa none the less made anunignorable contribution to clarify the fauna and flora there: he found at least four new varieties of
insects, one of which, incidentally, was named after him: Gudea Ichikawana, a large-sized stinkbug.

The Tokyo Imperial University (1906–1912)
The School of Letters, the Tokyo Imperial University, had two departments Ichikawa
wished to study in: those of English and Linguistics. Though his main interest lay definitely in theformer, which exactly was called “the Department of English Language and Literature,” what hechose was the Department of Linguistics chaired by Katsuji Fujioka (藤岡勝二, 1872–1935). Wider
range of linguistic knowledge, he expected, would push him to further height in the study of English.
His expectation would turn out to be right in the coming years. So he learned Greek and Latin under
the famous Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923) and Emile-Louis Heck (1866–1943) in addition to
Italian, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Sanskrit, Korean, Ainu and so forth.
He started French, too, at university and could learn it really rapidly thanks to the priorample knowledge of English and German (i.e. similar grammatical framework reflecting theircommon Indo-European background and Latin-based vocabulary in particular). Thus he fulfilledwith ease all the BA requirements for linguistic mastery: two languages out of English, German andFrench were required to finish the undergraduate course of three years then, whereas he passed all ofthese three languages in his freshman year !
In time he made up his mind to concentrate on the historical development of English,
luckily, as he recalled later, having encountered the ideal master, John Lawrence (1850–1916), whojoined the university at the same time that Ichikawa was admitted. Lawrence was not a big name inEurope, since he painstakingly pursued his studies in spite of adversity and, accordingly, could not
produce plenty of written works: it was only in his forties that he defended his dissertation andstarted his academic career. He was, none the less, a keen and talented pursuer of the historicaldevelopment of English as well as a true man of letters, versed in the wide range of English/
European literary works throughout the history. Koeber, respected by everyone, highly estimatedhim as the pride and honor of the university. Ichikawa himself noted in his declining years that
Lawrence was by far the very best scholar of English that Japan had ever had and that it would be far
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from imaginable to invite a foreign scholar surpassing him in the years to come.
Lawrence had a duty to lecture twelve hours a week, but he soon noticed that it would not
be enough. He happened to know there was a vacant room in the School of Medicine building andestablished his English Seminar, where he spent an extra 24 hours a week instructing each student
wishing to improve their language competence.
Ichikawa applied for Lawrence’s Seminar, admitted after passing an entrance exam, andvoluntarily had, all through his undergraduate years, what he later labeled “really hard training”
mainly in Old English and Middle English, which was partly shared by Tsutomu Chiba (千葉勉,
1883–1959), future professor at Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. Ichikawa was not released
even for summer holiday: invited to Karuizawa to the north, where Lawrence used to stay avoiding
the heat in Tokyo, he had intensive phonetics training several hours each day. As a postgraduate
student Ichikawa learned Old Icelandic, Gothic and read various old literary works in Greek, Latin,
and Old French as well as those Germanic languages: Homer’s Odyssey, Livy, Chanson de Roland,
Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, etc., etc. He perfectly learned everything Lawrence provided in the
Seminar, with the only exception of demanding Virgil, which Ichikawa gave up halfway, letting hisclassmate receive regular one-to-one private lessons from the learned Englishman. The lucky man
was Hidenaka Tanaka (田中秀央, 1886–1974), who was accepted in the Seminar, thanks to Koeber’skind recommendation, without the entrance exam and would be the first professor of classics at
Kyoto.
Ichikawa, Tanaka, and Kōchi Doi (土居光知, 1886–1979), future professor of English
literature at Sendai, were housemates for two out of three of their postgraduate years. It all started
with Ichikawa, who felt awkward to live on in his late father’s house in Akihabara, now that it wasinherited by his elder brother San’yō, who, to make it more awkward, got married and began a newlife there. Ichikawa fortunately found a nice two-story house to move into: several-roomed, with asympathetic garden, within walking distance from the university. But it seemed barely possible forhim alone to afford everything including the pay for a servant who would do the household chores,
as it was necessary to employ such a person in those days. A suggestion to share the house and go
Dutch was uttered by Ichikawa, instantly welcomed by Tanaka — a bit like Holmes and Watson —,and after just a little while Doi joined them. This is what brought them together and closer, so theirfriendship lasted their whole lives long.
Now Ichikawa’s hard work with Lawrence bore its first fruit in his BA thesis submitted in
April 1909, titled “On the Historical Development of the Functions of ‘for’,” which consists ofvi+256 pages with occasional comments and corrections on the opposite blank pages. It began withan extract from Tennyson’s beautiful poem Flower in the Crannied Wall: the author intended a sortof pun “for — flower” but it was not properly understood by the adviser, as Ichikawa guessed later.
His thesis, in contrast, was highly estimated and ensured him summa cum laude, since it

4was truly a valuable contribution in the sense that it covered practically all the uses, living andobsolete, of for, which were analyzed in every detail in terms of Germanic and English historicaldevelopment. Reference was made to Old English, Middle English, Gothic and Old Icelandic
evidences, mainly taken from gospels and such monumental literary works as Beowulf, The
Canterbury Tales, various works of Shakespeare, various Sagas, and others, in comparison withGreek, Latin, German, French, and even Japanese (exclusively semantic) data. Lawrence left 18
pages of comment, seemingly praising what Ichikawa had done. However, its detail, I must confess,remains to be clarified as his handwriting is, unlike Ichikawa’s, not rarely illegible.
Ichikawa’s thesis won a considerable reputation soon. Shintarō Kiyasu (喜安璡太郎,
1876–1955) was one of those early admirers of his talent and achievement. Kiyasu, the famous
editor of the English information journal Rising Generation or Eigo-Seinen, introduced Ichikawa as“a marvelous linguist” who, allegedly, well acquainted with seven languages, had made atremendous achievement which astonished Lawrence. A year later Ichikawa, definitely persuaded by
Kiyasu, made his first contribution to Eigo-Seinen. It was, unexpectedly, neither linguistic nor
literary, but was his amusing “table speech” delivered at an English speaking assembly, which wasso full of puns and jokes that Rintarō Fukuhara (福原麟太郎, 1894–1981) at Tokyo University of
Education (today’s Tsukuba University), who read it for the first time after Ichikawa’s death, wasimpressed at how very witty and good at English Ichikawa was in his mid-twenties.
It was only after that, i.e. when he was in his second postgraduate year, that his regularcontribution of “Ei-Bunten-Sadan” (英文典瑣談) or “Nitpicking English Grammar” series began.
Strongly influenced by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), Cornelis Stoffel (1845–1908), Johan Storm(1836–1920), and Eduard Mätzner (1805–1902), in particular, through the years under Lawrence,
Ichikawa paid attention to minor grammatical deviations scattered in English, collecting examples
through his wide range of reading, and trying to find how those irregular phenomena had come about.
In this series he showed the reader those, let us say, non-standard English expressions and their
possible explanations. They were later gathered in his first book Ei-Bumpō-Kenkyū (Studies inEnglish Grammar) which came out soon after he finished his postgraduate course and just before his
departure for Europe on a scholarship from the Ministry of Education.

Three years abroad (1912–1916)
Ichikawa’s first destination was Oxford, Lawrence’s alma mater. He left Shimbashi
Station on October 24, 1912, seen off by Lawrence, set sail from Kobe in November (the exact dateunknown), and reached London on December 19. He spent three weeks’ Christmas holiday there,
seeing the sights as well as museums, getting used to the geography including the East End, andrepeatedly visiting book sellers all around the city of fog. On January 11 he called, as arranged, on
Lawrence’s mate Prof. William Ker (['kɛə], 1855–1923) of the University College London and5hurried to Paddington, to move into the city of dreaming spires in time. He came to stay with a
private family, natives of Edinburgh, and wrote to his ex-advisor in Tokyo that he was lucky to beable to taste different labels of Scotch each day.
His health, considerably weakened through the years of excessive hard work, was getting
better as he became used to Oxford, relaxed without pressure, and adopted a rule of walking in thegreen every day.
At Oxford Ichikawa gradually got to know people, partly thanks to his attendance atseveral classes: Arthur Sampson Napier (1853–1916), Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861–1922),
Hermann Georg Fiedler (1862–1945), William Alexander Craigie (1867–1957) among others. But
soon, as he confessed to Lawrence, those lectures had begun to pall on him since he could learn there
scarcely anything more than he had already learned in Tokyo: undergrads at Oxford, allegedly,
would not study much and the lectures there were, as a matter of course, basically for them. The
honorable Joseph Wright (1855–1930), a real self-made man, announced his intention of holding aclass at his own home for discussion of philological problems. Ichikawa thought that would be reallyinteresting and worth attending, but then not a single student wished to attend it, so this had fallen
through, although Ichikawa was privately invited to tea from time to time.
Ichikawa may well have thought it wiser to go on with his studies on his own and collectfor the future, taking advantage of his stay in Britain, as much material as possible that would beinaccessible elsewhere. Incidentally, this was exactly what Ker had predicted.
So he did what he should do. He knew that libraries in Japan generally, not only the one in
his alma mater, needed rapid enhancing especially with resources from the West. Even such journals
were not there as Englische Studien and Anglia, indispensable for the philological study of English.
Moreover, the books and journals then in print were not enough. Older ones also needed to beobtained second-hand. So every month Ichikawa, cutting all his living costs, spent on those printed
matters as much as 100 yen out of 180, the monthly grant sent from Japan. Frequent shortage offunds was each time compensated out of his own purse.
His high-aimed investment was beginning to be rewarded. He accumulated many books he
had long wanted to obtain. It was rather acrobatic that he obtained part of the late Henry Sweet’s(1845–1912) library from Blackwell before they were catalogued and put to public sale. What Walter
William Skeat (1835–1912) left also partially came into his possession. So he had a handsome andprecious library towards the end of his stay in Britain, which would, he believed, surely benefit him
and his followers.
Ichikawa spent his holiday, energetically travelling and seeing the sights all around theBritish Isles. For the spring of 1913 he left Oxford northward, visited Warwick, Rugby, Rimington,
Kenilworth, Coventry, Lichfield, Birmingham, Manchester, Chester, Liverpool, Southport, andstayed on the Isle of Man. After a while he left Oxford again to stay at Stratford-upon-Avon for the6

Shakespeare Day towards the end of April.
For the summer he made, let us say, “a grand Celtic tour.” This time he first headed west
for Aberystwyth, Wales, by way of Malvern, Worcester, Hereford, Shrewsbury, and climbed up
Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales.
Then he sailed to Dublin, Ireland, turning to the north, visited Burtonport, the Aran Islands,
Tory Island, climbed holy Mt. Errigal, and stayed at Donegal to attend a summer Irish course. He
was warmly welcomed. Asked to give an address at the opening ceremony, he recited an impromptu
poem and received a big hand !
God send the flowers of Erin’s tongue,
As long as stands Mount Errigal,
May blossom e’er so wild and fair,
Upon the hills of Donegal !
Then he made his way north-east to Highlands, Scotland. After staying at Inverness andThurso, visiting Loch Ness and Dunnet Head, the most northerly point of Great Britain, he climbed
up Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles. From the summit, unfortunately, he could
see nothing but mist. This is what he left behind in the notebook at the cottage just below the peak:
I viewed the mist but missed the view I.
And Ichikawa’s grand Celtic tour was at last over in mid-October, after coming down toEngland, enjoying the Lake District peaceful scenery, and mountaineering tours to Helvellyn and
Scafell as a cooling-down stage.
Not sticking to Oxford, he then moved to Cambridge, and stayed there till Christmas time.
He was planning to spend the rest of his time in England in London, then move to Copenhagen to
study a term or so under Jespersen, and then to proceed to Germany.
But his plans were suddenly interrupted by World War I that broke out in 1914. There wasno alternative but to prolong his stay in London for several months, but it might have turned out
fortunate in a sense, because, taking advantage of this extra period of time, he brushed up his
knowledge and skill of phonetics intensively with Daniel Jones (1881–1967) as well as those of Old
Icelandic with Ker. Ichikawa was thinking of a reform in English education in Japan starting from its
phonetic aspect. He must have been affected by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion which opened in
London, coincidentally, in 1914 !
Meanwhile, he never failed to travel around. His second spring holiday was spent in thesouth. He visited, in particular, Land’s End and Lizard Head (the most westerly and southerly points
respectively of Cornwall and the British mainland), Exeter, and Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. Thatsummer he covered the eastern area he had never been: Thorp Arch in Yorkshire, Robin Hood’s
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Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere. He left a note that he was now familiar withpractically all the geographical names found in Baedeker’s Great Britain guidebook.
For several months Ichikawa waited for the war to be over in vain. He saw there was nohope left to step on the soil of Denmark and Germany, and to meet his idol Jespersen in person, sochanging his mind he decided to see ancient Greco-Roman relics and another English-speaking
country, the United States, avoiding the battle area.
Ichikawa left England in March 1915. And another grand tour began to mark the end of hisoverseas days. First he landed at Nice, in the southern and safer part of France, where he becameacquainted, perhaps by chance, with Kōsaku Hamada (濱田耕作, 1881–1938), associate professor ofarchaeology at Kyoto then, and future president of the university. Happily they hit it off right fromthe start and became perfect fellow-travelers for several months. They made friends with Archibald
Henry Sayce (1845–1933), professor of archaeology at Oxford, who spent his holiday there. Theyfrequently shared their daily tea time and walks along the coast. Of course they did not fail to enjoy
the warm sunshine and historic sights along the Côte d’Azur: Tarascon, Beaucaire, Arles, Nîmes, etc.
Then they proceeded to Rome, stayed there ten days trying to see everything though it was
far from possible, and moved on to Greece, where they spent a month and a half making a better
attempt at seeing everything: Athens, Crete, Delphi, Olympia, Mycenae, Sparta, Tiryns, etc.
Ichikawa alone climbed up Ida on Crete and Parnassus, to the north, but unfortunately missed
Olympus, on the top of which gods and goddesses are said to live.
After leaving Greece, greatly impressed, they sailed back to Italy, this time to Sicily, where
Ichikawa alone saw the historic sights at Messina and Syracuse, and climbed Mt. Etna. In the lattercity something extraordinary happened. While looking around, he was abruptly caught by the police,taken to their station, and questioned, definitely suspected of being a spy. He had several plant
specimens with tiny flowers, sandwiched in Baedeker’s guidebook he carried, of which he wasquestioned then: “E questo fanerogamo o crittogamo?” (= Is this phanerogamous or cryptogamous?)
In answer to this elementary question he must have uttered the first word for sure, since flowers are
the definite evidence that the plant is phanerogamous. It was a precious as well as disgusting
experience for him: this was the first and probably the last time that he used in ordinary conversation
those specialized botanical words or their Italian equivalents, to be more exact, that he had learned in
his early teens, i.e. in his first love days. Anyway, he was soon released, went on to Naples, revisitedRome, this time stayed there as long as he wished, we hope. After a while Ichikawa finally left
Europe and his dear friend Hamada for the New World.
Ichikawa landed in the United States in late September. As it appears, he stayed basicallyin Boston-Cambridge area, Massachusetts, visiting various historic sites in and around the state, andmaking occasional excursions, for instance, to New York, where he must have visited, perhaps
repeatedly, Columbia University in the City of New York, the Natural History Museum, i.e. today’s

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American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art among other institutions.
In November he visited the Niagara Falls. It is not known, unfortunately, how he got to the West
Coast and left for Japan, or what and whom he visited on the way.

Professor of English, the Tokyo Imperial University (1916–1946)
On January 19, 1916, Ichikawa was back in Japan. A month later he was welcomed as an
associate professor into the staff of his alma mater. It was not the Department of Linguistics he had
graduated from, but that of English that Ichikawa now belonged to. He must have been strongly
recommended for the post, in his absence, by his master Lawrence and the idea was alreadyapproved by Kazutoshi Ueda (上田萬年, 1867–1937), president of the School of Letters. Ichikawa
was ready as well as expected to assist his elderly master in instructing students and gradually totake over the latter’s mission. But it happened too abruptly. On March 11 Lawrence was hospitalized,
seriously suffering from influenza, which developed into critical pneumonia, and he passed away
early the next morning.
Now at the age of thirty he filled the chair of English, was to stay there till his retirement,
and was in charge of everything concerned. One of his first duties was to examine BA theses
submitted that year by those whom he had barely instructed and knew only slightly. It must havebeen not an easy task, as literary criticism and novel writing were the main interest for most of the
English majors in those days; thus they were more inclined to follow their idol Kinnosuke (Sōseki)Natsume (夏目金之助 (漱石), 1867–1916), graduate and ex-lecturer of the department, than to study
concrete literary works, old and new, in every detail and in view of the historical development ofEnglish, with Lawrence or later with Ichikawa, both of whom basically were pure linguists.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa ( 芥川龍之介 , 1892–1927) and Masao Kume ( 久米正雄 , 1891–1952),
semi-professional writers already then, were among those literature-oriented students. Minoru
Toyoda (豊田實, 1885–1972), later professor at Fukuoka, was an exception, interested in bothliterature and linguistics, and went on with his studies with Ichikawa in the postgraduate course. Yet,fortunately enough, everything went right. Ichikawa and Akutagawa, for instance, were on goodterms: they respected, spoke and wrote well of each other, even though their interests lay far apart.
This mismatch problem was to be solved in a few years when Takeshi Saitō (齋藤勇, 1887–1982)
joined the staff. Meanwhile Ichikawa became a full professor in 1920 and successfully defended his
doctoral dissertation three years later.
What Ichikawa taught through his thirty years of duty could roughly be classified into fivecategories. First, general introduction to the history of the English language, sometimes labeled“English etymology” or the like; secondly, English grammar or introduction to English philology/
linguistics, chiefly on the basis of Jespersen’s Philosophy of Grammar and Modern English
Grammar on Historical Principles among others; thirdly, Old English (Sweet’s Primer) and Middle
9English (The Canterbury Tales); fourthly, phonetics, following Jones; and fifthly, reading of various
literary works, which covered a wide range, reflecting his personal reading and choice: from
Shakespeare to such contemporary (in those days) novelists as Dickens, Stevenson, Thackeray,
Melville, and to Irish writers Synge, etc. On occasion Ichikawa lectured on Bible English, too.
What was more, he taught even Latin and Greek overtime for a limited period of time.
These classical languages were, after the retirement of Koeber and Heck, taught by Tanaka above,
their and the late Lawrence’s disciple. But, after a few years, Tanaka, headhunted, suddenly left for
Kyoto to fill the chair there. Recommended by the aged Koeber, Ichikawa inevitably and perhaps
reluctantly made up for the absence of his ex-housemate for several years, until their common
disciple Shigeichi Kure (呉茂一, 1897–1977) filled the vacancy. What a relief for him ! Nevertheless,it wasn’t over yet. After a few years the latter fell ill and resigned. Ichikawa had to fill in again andwait patiently till Kure’s post was finally filled by Tateo Kanda (神田盾夫, 1897–1986), who firstlearned English under Ichikawa for a time, then transferred to Kyoto and studied classics under
Tanaka. Kanda’s late father, baron Naibu (神田乃武, 1857–1923), was the first man who taught
Latin and Greek at Tokyo.
Ichikawa produced or helped produce innumerable human resources during his life time.
In the English Department at Tokyo alone, he, together with his colleagues, brought forth over a
thousand graduates during his years there, a considerable portion of whom were appointed all overthe country, leading English education or its linguistic/literary studies. Among those early students
are: Kōzō Hayashibara (林原耕三, 1887–1975), Tamihei Iwasaki (岩崎民平, 1892–1971), Tamotsu
Sone (曾根保, 1896–1976), Sakurō Kuno (久野朔郎, 1896–1968), the above-mentioned Kure,
Takanobu Ōtsuka (大塚高信, 1897–1979), Akira Tomita (富田彬, 1897–1971), Yasuo Yamato (大和資雄, 1898–1990, also known as Yasōanshujin 夜想庵主人), Kenshō Honda (本多顕彰, 1898–1978),Zenjirō Konishi (小西善次郎, 1900–1971), Yūkichi Nakamura (中村祐吉, 1901–1985), Naosuke
Irie (入江直祐, 1901–1991), Shigetake Suzuki (鈴木重威, 1903–1976), Tatsu Sasaki (佐々木達,
1904–1986), Fumio Nakajima (中島文雄, 1904–1999), Giichirō Maejima (前島儀一郎, 1904–1985),
Masami Nishikawa ( 西川正身 , 1904–1988), Tsuneo Kitamura ( 北村常夫 , 1904–1995), Tadao
Yamamoto (山本忠雄, 1904–1991), Mamoru Ōsawa (大沢衛, 1904–1980), Masayuki Kawarabata(河原畑正行, 1905–2003), Tsutomu Ueda (上田勤, 1906–1961), Natsuo Shumuta (朱牟田夏雄,
1906–1987), Mamoru Shimizu (清水護, 1908–2012), Shōji Kamiyama (神山正治, 1908–?), Ryōichi
Inui (乾亮一, 1910–1988), Chiaki Higashida (東田千秋, 1910–1992), Kagetomi Ueno (上野景福,
1910–1996), Ryūichi Kajiki (梶木隆一, 1910–2012), Rintarō Yagi (八木林太郎, 1910?–2009?),
Kazuo Nakahashi (中橋一夫, 1911–1957), Hideo Kanō (加納秀夫, 1911–2003), Masao Hirai (平井正穂, 1911–2005), Seiichi Hashiba (羽柴正市, 1913–?), Torajirō Fukumura (福村虎治郎, 1914–

2002), Kikuo Miyabe (宮部菊男, 1915–1982), Kenzō Kihara (木原研三, 1919–2009), and manyothers.

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Ichikawa’s disciples were not necessarily restricted to English majors. Some of them were
graduates of the Department of Linguistics as he was himself. Atsuo Kobayashi (小林淳男, 1896–
1978) studied Indo-European languages extensively, with comparative linguistics as his aim, andthus learned from Ichikawa Old English as well as other old Germanic languages. Kobayashi, after
graduation and several years’ study in the US and Europe, was called back to fill the new chair of
linguistics at Sendai. But the chair was abruptly cancelled due to the consequent financial reduction
after the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. Kobayashi was to fill the post of English linguistics
instead. Anyway, his knowledge of English, especially in its historical aspect, was that of a specialist,
so that important roles were often allotted to him in Ichikawa’s various projects. Satoru Bandō (坂東省, 1899–1933) was another such promising young scholar, who passed away too early. Ichikawa

arranged the publication of his last work (Japanese version of Karl Luick’s „Über einige
Zukunftaufgaben der englischen Sprachwissenschft“), found posthumously in his study, andIchikawa added a detailed necrology himself. Among other linguistics majors are his ex-housemate
Tanaka’s nephew Harushige Kōdzu (高津春繁, 1908–1973), devoted to Greek and Indo-European
studies, and Shirō Hattori (服部四郎, 1908–1995), basically a phonetician and Mongolicist, whotransferred from the Department of English to that of Linguistics at the end of his freshman year.
They would help him a lot, after his retirement, in co-editing the two-volume An Introduction to the
Languages of the World (1952–1955), in which Kōdzu and Ichikawa were in charge of the first
volume on Indo-European languages whereas Hattori was practically in charge of the second one on
those of Asia.
He did take notice of people and works outside the Tokyo Imperial University. He
examined, for instance, An Outline of English Syntax (英文法汎論, 1912) in every detail, contributed
a review of it to Eigo-Seinen, and sent a self-made errata to its author Itsuki Hosoe (細江逸記, 1884–1947), graduate of Tokyo School of Foreign Languages and later professor of English at the Osaka
Higher School of Commerce (today’s Osaka City University). Hosoe, in turn, acknowledged
Ichikawa’s cooperation in the preface of its later editions. They had known each other, as Ichikawa
later recalled, since their early twenties. They had a dispute on some linguistic matter, but they seemto have been on a fairly good terms with each other. Hosoe, after visiting Scandinavia, kindly gave
him a copy of a hand-made reproduction of Malmstedt’s Studies in English Grammar (1898), which
was completely out of circulation and Ichikawa had long wanted to obtain in vain. Hosoe had asplendid chance to meet the author in person, borrowed the rare book for a while, and hand-typed
everything with surprising accuracy. Ichikawa acknowledged Hosoe’s kindness, after the latter’s
death, and now the valuable reproduction belongs to the University of Tokyo. Unfortunately it is notincluded in Hosoe Collection of Kansai University.
Jirō Takenaka ( 竹中治郎 , 1910–1976) was another such person to be described as
Ichikawa’s personal friend. After studying several years at Columbia, he thought it better to study

11further under Ichikawa to ensure his career in Japan, who, on the contrary, kindly declined his offer,commenting that he was already highly qualified and should go on on his own. Later he became aprofessor of English at Meiji Gakuin University and their friendship lasted for the rest of their lives.
Ichikawa persuaded able people to join his various projects, no matter what educational
background they had. Among those were the above-mentioned Fukuhara, Shigeshi Nishimura (西村稠, 1886–1967) from Tokyo School of Foreign Studies, Hakuson Ishii (石井白村, 1902–1969) from

Seisoku English School, Chiaki Kizaki (木坂千秋, ?–1945?) from Kyoto, who died in the war,
Junzaburō Nishiwaki (西脇順三郎, 1894–1982) and his student Fumio Kuriyagawa (厨川文夫,
1907–1978) from Keio University, Ineko Kondō ( 近藤いね子 , 1911–2008) from the Tohoku
Imperial University, Seiichi Sugai (須貝清一, ?–?) and Yoshio Manabe (眞鍋義雄, ?–?) from theHiroshima Higher Normal School (today’s Hiroshima University), Masatoshi Nakauchi (中内正利,
1903–1985) from the Osaka Higher School of Commerce, seemingly Hosoe’s student, and others.

His achievements
Most of Ichikawa’s early individual achievements, represented by his maiden monographStudies in English Grammar (1912) above, are on the same line as his BA thesis (1909). He studied
the historical development of English focusing on certain curious, exceptional, or even obsolete
linguistic phenomena that appeared in various literary works, both old and new. It may be closer tophilology in today’s terminology, but he called it grammatical studies, which could be justified inthat study of those tiny phenomena can sometimes lead to some systematic grammatical change in along run. In the late nineteenth century, in Germany particularly, the term “grammar” or its German
equivalent „Grammatik“ would often imply long historical development of a given language fromthe proto-language. Strongly affected by his master Lawrence, Ichikawa used the word in a similar,
though maybe slightly different, meaning, which was basically shared for instance by his idol
Jespersen but is not common today.
As is assumed, the same historical policy underlay his doctoral dissertation “On thelanguage of the poetry of Robert Browning,” defended in 1923, though, sorry to say, it was burnt toashes in the fire after the Great Earthquake.
He never lost his interest in historical linguistics, as is clearly seen, for instance, in his“Grimm and Verner” (1949) and “Umlaut and Ablaut” (1950), contributed to Eigo-Seinen after
retirement. But the middle-aged Ichikawa rarely touched upon the history of English. Perhaps theneed was much greater as well as urgent to edit guidebooks on various aspects of English and related
studies for students. So, other than numerous reports, reviews, and comments that appeared chiefly
in Eigo-Seinen and Studies in English Literature (The English Literary Society of Japan), hepublished in book form: an introductory booklet The International Phonetic Alphabet (1920);
Stevenson’s Treasure Island annotated (1921), based on the lecture he gave and Iwasaki jotted12down; Pronouncing Dictionary of English (1923) in collaboration again with Iwasaki; the General
Prologue of The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer with introduction, notes, and glossary (1925), later
revised by Tamotsu Matsunami (松浪有, 1924–1995); the Japanese version of Jespersen’s Language,
its Nature, Development and Origin (1927) in collaboration with Kaku Jimbō (神保格, 1883–1965);
An Introduction to Latin and Greek for Students of English (1929), partly assisted by his
ex-housemate Tanaka; An Introduction to Old English and Middle English (1935), later revised by
Matsunami; English Linguistics: Studies and Bibliographical Survey (1936); Bible English (1937);
an abridged Japanese version of Der Bau der englischen Sprache, i.e. The Structure of the English
Language by Georg Weber (1937); a booklet Introduction to the History of the English Language(1941); and Eigo-Zakkō or a compilation of lectures on English he delivered on various occasions(1947).
Ichikawa was a very good coordinator, too, putting into practice various projects whichwere hardly realizable single-handedly.
To inspire and improve the linguistic or philological studies of English in Japan, headvised promising scholars to briefly introduce in Japanese remarkable achievements in the Westand edited the “English Linguistics Pamphlet” (or should we call it “Booklet”?) series (1933–1940),
which comprised:
1. R. E. Zachrisson, Grammatical changes in present-day English (Kuno, 1933);
2. M. Schwarz, Alliteration im englischen Kulturleben neuerer Zeit (Maejima, 1933);
3. H. O. Coleman, Intonation and emphasis (Iwasaki, 1933);
4. L. Morsbach, Die geschichtlichen, kulturellen und literarischen Grundlagen der neuenglischen
Sprachentwicklung, etc. (Nakajima, 1933);
5. A. Western, On sentence-rhythm and word-order in modern English (Ōtsuka, 1933);
6. K. Luick, Über einige Zukunftaufgaben der englischen Sprachwissenschaft (Bandō, 1933);
7. T. H. Svartengren, Intensifying similes in English (Sasaki, 1934);
8. H. O. Östberg, Personal names in appellative use in English (Suzuki, 1934);
9. E. Klein, Die verdunkelten Wortzusammensetzungen im Neuenglischen (Hakuichi Shigemi,
1934);
10. W. Horn, Sprachkörper und Sprachfunktion (Yamamoto, 1934);
11. L. Pound, Blends, their relation to English word-formation (Hideyoshi Wakabayashi, 1934);
12. E. Rodhe, Transitivity in modern English (Tsuneo Kitabatake, 1934);
13. C. A. Smith, The short circuit in English syntax (Shin’ichi Takaya, 1934);
14. O. Jespersen, Notes on metre (Shimizu, 1934);
15. O. Funke, Jerspersens Lehre von den „Three ranks“ (Nakajima, 1934);
16. G. O. Curme, History of the English gerund (Kobayashi, 1935);
17. P. Fijn van Draat, Rhythm in English prose (Takejirō Nakayama, 1935);13

18. G. H. McKnight, Words and culture history (Kuno, 1935);
19. A. Biard, L’article «the» et les caractéristiques différentielles de son emploi (Kuriyagawa, 1936);
20. M. Deutschbein, Stilistischer Wert der syntaktischen Gebilde (Higashida, 1936);
21. W. P. Chalmers, Charakteristische Eigenschaften von R. L. Stevensons Stil (Iwasaki, 1936);
22. K. H. Collitz, Verbs of motion in their semantic divergence (Sugai, 1936);
23. H. Spies, Der Slang im neuen England usw. (Manabe, 1936);
24. R. E. Zachrisson, Ǻlderdomlig Engelska (Maejima, 1936);
25. G. Weber, Der Bau der englischen Sprache (Ichikawa himself, 1937);
26. T. Dahl, Shall and Will; Should and Would (Nakauchi, 1937);
27. E. Sapir, Sound patterns in language; On the phonological system of modern English; V.
Mathesius, Zur synchronischen Analyse fremden Sprachguts (Kizaka, 1940);
28. H. Poutsma, Preposition from a grammar of late modern English (Yagi, 1940).
And Ichikawa edited The Kenkyusha Dictionary of English Philology (1940), a
monumental as well as voluminous work of nearly 1200 pages, covering virtually everything in thewide range of English philology/linguistics then, thanks to the devoted cooperation not only from his
leading disciples but also from other promising scholars with whom he had established trusting
relationships in the course of editing the series above.
As was mentioned, Ichikawa had been immensely fond of English literary works as well as
their linguistic side ever since his mid-teens. So, together with Yoshisaburō Okakura (岡倉由三郎,
1868–1936), brother of the famous Tenshin (天心, 1862–1913) and professor of English literature at
the Tokyo Higher Normal School (today’s Tsukuba University), he thought up a highly laborious
project to annotate in Japanese all the main notable English literary works of the last four centuries,
to let a wide range of people be acquainted with them, and eventually to activate the study of English
in Japan. This “English Literature” series started with King Lear with Ichikawa’s annotation in 1921
and, thanks to the cooperation from many scholars including their direct disciples, produced asurprising 100 volumes within only ten-odd years, covering Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Scott,Byron, Tennyson, Eliot, Hardy, Gaskell, Stevenson, Shaw, Lamb, Carlyle, Pater, Gissing, Holmes,
Kipling, Conrad, etc. and such American writers as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Poe, Twain. The two
editors-in-chief not only annotated themselves number of works each, but also elaborately checkedand corrected, it is said, all the galley proofs before printing.
Incidentally, Ichikawa had been a great fan of The New English Dictionary since the days
he studied with Lawrence, who had been consulting it all the time. It started in 1888, appeared inmany fascicles, was completed at last in 1928, and was later renamed The Oxford English Dictionary.
Under its influence extensive English-Japanese dictionaries came out one after another. Ichikawa
compiled one of them, Fuzambō’s Comprehensive English-Japanese Dictionary (1931) of nearly
2000 pages, in collaboration with Kaishū Kuroyanagi (畔柳芥舟, 1871–1923) and Kōzaburō Iijima
14

(飯島廣三郎, 1867–1931).
Strangely enough, he did not touch upon Kenkyūsha’s New English-Japanese Dictionary(1927), the so-called Dai-Eiwa, which Okakura was in charge of. It was certainly not the publisher,
but the editorial policy, in all likelihood, that kept him away. The dictionary was then revised in thesecond edition (1936) by Iwasaki and then completely taken over by him in the third (1953) and
fourth (1960) editions, only in the last of which Ichikawa’s name appeared as an advisor. And fromthe same publisher Ichikawa was to bring forth, besides several collections of his carefree essays,
The Kenkyusha Dictionary of English Quotations (1952), An Introduction to the Languages of theWorld (1952–1955) above, and The Kenkyusha Dictionary of Current English Idioms (1964) andothers in collaboration with his fellow scholars of the next generation.
Ichikawa belonged to a number of academic societies in his lifetime. He was among thechief founders of at least three such ones. One of them is The English Literary Society, founded in
1917, the second year of his career. It was first a relatively small-sized group of people including
alumni inside the Tokyo Imperial University. Ten-odd years later it grew up into a nationwide one
and was renamed The English Literary Society of Japan, which Ichikawa chaired several years.
Another such one is The Shakespeare Society of Japan, founded in 1929, in which heserved as the first president, with Shōyō Tsubouchi (坪内逍遥, 1859–1935) as its president emeritus.
The other society he was deeply immersed in was The Institute for Research in Language
Teaching or Go-Ken for short. It was first organized by the Ministry of Education under the name of
The Institute for Research in English Teaching and Ichikawa was appointed as one of its directors.
As its “linguistic adviser” or hopeful key reformer of English education in Japan, they invited Harold
Edward Palmer (1877–1949), self-taught phonetician and former private language instructor in
Belgium, who got acquainted with Daniel Jones through The International Phonetic Association and,back in England, served at first as a part-time assistant, then as a full-time lecturer in phonetic
training for foreign students at the University of London.
So in 1922 Palmer came over to Japan and, as the president of the Institute, introduced hisoral and phonetics-based method of teaching English. After he left in 1936, Ichikawa practically took
over the Institute and contributed a lot to reform language teaching in general in Japan: first as its
director in chief (1937–1939), then as the president (1939–1957), then again as the director in chieftill his last day.
What he had done was really tremendous. No wonder he was once respectfully called the“King of English in Japan” by Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956), an American journalist, cultural
critic, and scholar of American English. For the achievement he had made, Ichikawa was welcomed
into The Japan Academy composed exclusively of distinguished scholars in 1939, gained thehonorific title Person of Cultural Merit in 1959, and was awarded The Order of the Rising Sun in
1964.
15

Married Life and Declining Years (1916–1970)
The first thirty years of Ichikawa’s life were filled with loves for natural history and thenfor English, including its sister languages and written works in them. On the threshold of the next
thirty years, 1916 saw Ichikawa, back in Japan and tenured, suffer the sudden loss of his respected
master, yet it also saw him find the joy of life. He had his third love — love for the gentle sex andhis own family. Now began his family-oriented period of life.
Soon after his return, he was introduced to a young lady of noble birth: Haruko (晴子,
1896–1943), the third daughter of baron Nobushige Hodzumi (穂積陳重, 1855–1926), famous jurist,
professor and president of the School of Law, the Tokyo Imperial University. Her grandfather was
viscount Eiichi Shibusawa (渋沢栄一, 1840–1931), the father of Japanese capitalism. Haruko’s
brother Shigetō (重遠, 1883–1951) was a friend of Ichikawa’s, for they were fellow-travelers when
they sailed for Europe some years before. Soon after Shigetō was back in Japan in late February,
1916, he agreed to couple his youngest sister with his respectable friend, foreseeing that they would
make a perfect match. In fact she was a very cheerful, talkative, warm-hearted, and, what was more,
smart lady, who instinctively knew how to cheer up people. She was the right woman that not only
Ichikawa himself but also all the people around him had long wished there to be.
Ichikawa was a calm-tempered and kind-hearted man, full of Christian charity, but he did
not like to talk. “You are a silent man, worse than I am” — that was the comment he received from a“silent” American zoologist when they were engaged in the expedition on Jeju Island together. His
untalkativeness was often taken for unfriendliness, surliness, and, when exaggerated, evencold-bloodedness. Behind his back some wicked students nicknamed him “惨鬼,” which sounds thesame as his first name but the characters used instead mean a “cruel monster.” That was more than asmiling joke.
Their wedding was held at Hibiya Daijingū (continued by Tokyo Daijingū near Iidabashi),on October 15, 1916. And Ichikawa’s third love life started in their sweet home in Nijikkimachi, tothe north of Ichigaya. It was, seemingly, full of love, as it should be. They soon produced two sonsSan’ei (三栄, 1917–1943) and San’ai (三愛, 1919–1926), and a daughter Mieko (三枝子, 1922–
2008). Their names, as well as Ichikawa’s, began with the character “三” (three) in accordance withthe family tradition, traced back to his grand-grandfather’s humor: his son, later nicknamed Beian(米庵), was born at the hour of the boar (around 10:00 pm) on the day of the boar in the month of
the boar (October) and thus was named Sangai “三亥” (three boars).
“Children are the sun that gives warmth and comfort to us adults” — that is what Ichikawa
wrote several years later. He truly loved them. Now they needed a bigger house to live in and moved
to a spacious place in Kita-Yamabushi-cho, just a bit to the north. Ichikawa had a perfect study built
there: comfortable to work in and large enough to keep his whole library neatly. It was the size of16

30–40 tatami mats, that is roughly 50–65 square meters big, as Kuriyagawa reported later.
Haruko was both a devoted mother to the children and a perfect wife to the untalkative
scholar. She was very intuitive. A word was just enough for her to grasp the situation her husband
was in, to guess what he wanted her to do, and to set everything right. Sometimes she did not evenneed a word.
And she was a perfect hostess, endowed with an exceptional memory, made friends withliterally anyone, instantly learned faces, names, backgrounds with ease, and could recognize anyone
that had come around before: her husband’s colleagues, students, ex-students, even their wives andchildren. She was always ready and found it fun to entertain them (and her husband, at the sametime) with witty talk.
She saw to it that Ichikawa could work as much as he wished and the children looked up to
their untalkative but warm-hearted father. He, once getting out of his study, Mieko recalls, would
just keep smiling and enjoy watching his family have a good time chattering, laughing, singing, or
playing cards, chess, etc. When he joined those games, he would always lose and still keep smiling.
She had never been scolded by him. She had never seen him get angry. No wonder she could not
believe that students were afraid of him.
On Sundays the family went out of the megalopolis to their country cottage Shō-San-RinDō (小山林堂), named after his grandfather’s taste, in Kinuta or today’s Seijō. It was a rural area
then, not integrated into Tokyo yet. The children enjoyed nature as he himself used to, whilst he wasbusy looking after his “Shakespeare garden”: he was planning a perfect reproduction of the flora of
Shakespeare’s world. In summer they would enjoy together hiking, swimming, bicycle riding,playing tennis, ping-pong, collecting plants and insects, as they spent their holiday in Hayama, by
the sea, and, from 1933 on, in mountainous Kita-Karuizawa, where they obtained another nicecottage.
The married couple took regular trips for two, visiting hot springs, mountaineering,sometimes taking advantage of invitations from ex-students scattered all over Japan. They went
overseas, too. After visiting Korea in 1927, they made a grand tour in 1931 on an Albert Kahn
Traveling Scholarship. Ichikawa took a year’s leave.
So they left Tokyo on March 20, set sail from Kobe for Tianjin (天津), saw a bit of Beijing(北京), then Mukden (奉天, i.e. today’s Shenyang 瀋陽), Harbin (哈爾浜), and went through the
USSR to Europe on the Trans-Siberian railway. Stopping at Berlin and Paris, they hurried across thestrait to Stratford-upon-Avon to be in time for the Shakespeare Day on April 24.
Travelling all over the British Isles for a month, they made their way across the strait backto the Continent, made a quick tour around Belgium and the Netherlands, and, after ten days’ stay inParis, set off to see Iberia.
Now they headed north-east by air and called on the aged Jespersen in Copenhagen, who17

warmly welcomed the Japanese scholar known for almost twenty years through correspondence.
Ichikawa’s dream to see his idol in person finally came true. Jespersen later referred in his
autobiography to their visit and Haruko’s Japanese Lady in Europe, published a few years after that.
And then the Japanese couple went on with their tour around the Baltic Sea clockwise:
Oslo, Bergen. Stockholm, Uppsala, Helsinki, Reval (Talinn), Riga, Kovno (Kaunas), Koenigsberg(Kaliningrad), Danzig (Gdańsk), Poznań, and Berlin again.
In Switzerland they enjoyed their summer, visiting such famous scenic spots as Interlaken,
Zermatt, Lucerne and climbing the Jungfrau and Gornergrat. In the meantime Ichikawa attended thesecond International Congress of Linguists held at Geneva that year. There he had the second chance
to see Jespersen. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the Ichikawas visited and had a talk with
Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935), the first professor of Linguistics at Tokyo, who was spending
his retired years at a hotel there. He still spoke fluent Japanese after so many years.
A train ride through the famous Simplon Tunnel took the Ichikawas to Italy where they
visited Milan, Genoa, Monaco (next to Italy), Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples and headed north for
Vienna by way of Assisi and Venice. Ichikawa apparently avoided the more southern part of Italy,
having a bitter memory of the past when he was suspected of being a spy and was nearly put underarrest.
Starting with the Habsburg capital, they opened up another and last tour for two, this timearound the Eastern Europe and the East-Mediterranean world: Prague, transiting at Vienna, Budapest,
Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Constanța, Istanbul. From the old European city belonging to Turkey
they set sail to Athens, saw Corinth, Mycenae, etc., and set sail again for Alexandria on the otherside of the Mediterranean Sea. On landing on the African continent, they looked around Cairo,
Pyramids, Memphis, Luxor, and from Port Said Haruko alone left for Japan on October 20. The ship
took its course through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, stopping at Colombo,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and finally reached Kobe seemingly in late November.
Ichikawa the grass widower turned back and headed north again via Cairo and Trieste. He
wanted to see more of Germany and visited Munich, Berlin again, Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar,
Nuremberg (Nürnberg), Heidelberg, Frankfurt-am-Main, Eisenach (Wartburg), Berlin again, andHamburg. On December 8 he set sail from Cuxhaven for the USA.
He reached New York on December 19, deeply impressed by the considerable increase of
skyscrapers and motorcars. While staying there, he visited Columbia University among otherinstitutions and saw Professor George Philip Krapp (1872–1934). Off he went south-west by train,
visiting Washington, D.C. and then Richmond, Virginia.
In the latter city he participated in the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting andwas asked to say a few words of impressions about the International Congress of Linguists at
Geneva. He met Hans Kurath (1891–1992), professor of English and Linguistics at the University of18

Michigan, with whom he had had correspondence. Among those who came into his acquaintancewere such esteemed Indo-Europeanists as Edgar Sturtevant (1875–1952), the president of the Society,
Hermann Collitz (1855–1935), the first president and the main founder of it, and Jerzy Kuryłowicz(1895–1978), a visiting Professor at Yale then. Ichikawa had an impression of the latter as too
self-assertive.
The New Year’s Day of 1932 found him on the train for New Orleans, where he arrived on
the third. He left it the very next day for Waco, Texas, where he stayed a couple of days to visit
Baylor University and professor Andrew Joseph Armstrong (1873–1954), with whom he had hadcorrespondence. Heading west, stopping at Brownwood, Clovis, and Albuquerque, he got to Santa
Fe, New Mexico, where he spent several days to see the sights including Native American villages.
And he went on with his westward train ride to Los Angeles, California, where the mostimpressive things for him were the Huntington Library and Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus
Temple, very popular in those days. In San Francisco he visited Stanford University and the
University of California, Berkeley, and set sail for home on January 23. On the way he enjoyed hislast fortnight in Hawaiian warmth, visiting the University of Hawaii, the volcano, etc. Ichikawa
arrived in Yokohama on February 26 safe and sound.
Their great journey was later described in full detail in the Ichikawas’ collaboration Every
Corner of Europe and the USA (1932) and Haruko’s Things in Contemporary Britain (1933), both inJapanese. 1937 saw the first two-thirds of the the former book published in English. It was Haruko’s
contribution, edited by William Plomer (['pluːmə], 1903–1973), renamed Japanese Lady in Europe,and met with a favorable reception overseas.
Perhaps its positive reputation led the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to persuade Haruko to
travel, this time, across the USA, see everything, get acquainted with a wide range of people, andhelp promote the friendship between the two nations as a civil delegate. She agreed, after somehesitation, and left Yokohama alone in December 1937, seen off by her family. Her tour in the USA
began from San Francisco at Christmas time, and took her to Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland.
There she took a transcontinental train all the way to the East Coast, and visited New York,
Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Niagara Falls, and Chicago. Heading south and west then, she got
acquainted with Rock Island, Illinois, New Orleans, Albuquerque, a Native American pueblo called
Acoma, Santa Fe, Santa Clara Pueblo, Carlsbad, Grand Canyon, Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover
Dam ten years later), and came back to California, where she spent some time in Los Angeles, Santa
Barbara, on Santa Catalina Island. After all of these visits, she sailed off to Japan via Hawaii, andlanded in Yokohama on April 1, 1938.
Everywhere she instantly made friends with people, taking advantage of her innate
friendliness and kindness. She made witty impromptu speeches at several assemblies, appeared insome local newspapers, and was interviewed on a radio program in New York. She, as was expected,

19

must have left a highly positive image of Japan and its people.
Ichikawa was deeply immersed in family happiness. And his way of instructing students
was changing for the better or milder, perhaps without his knowing it. But the happiness did not lastfor ever. First, his younger son San’ai died of diphtheria at the age of eight, to whom Ichikawa andHaruko compiled a tribute booklet Ai-chan (1927).
Seventeen years later, in April his dear sister Yone (米, ?–1943) died, who took care of him
in his youth in place of his divorced mother. What was more, San’ei died in October. He followed
his father’s track, studied English, especially its stylistics with Saitō, got engaged with a perfect lady,
and started his promising career as an English scholar at Maidzuru. But, after a few months, hesuddenly fell ill and came back to Tokyo. He was seized by terrible and persistent headaches, thecause of which was not known. Hospitalized for several months, the unwell San’ei could not standthe pain any longer and took hidden pills to get rid of it. It was the hospital, as Ichikawa believed,that was to blame, for they did not notice that San’ei kept toxicant.
The family suffered a great deal from the deaths of their sons. Ichikawa, on the brink of
the retirement age of 60, thought it unnecessary to keep his large-scale personal library any longer,
which he expected would be helpful to the children. He made up his mind to donate it so that it
might encourage and promote further study of English all over Japan, either in linguistics or literarystudies. The valuable library is now divided into several parts and belongs to the University of Tokyo,
Keio University, Tsuda University, and Osaka Municipal Library among others. He even opened his
spacious house in Kita-Yamabushi-chō for several years to his ex-students and mates who sufferedfrom bombing and lost their houses.
Haruko’s despair was even more serious. Psychologically damaged, she insisted that she
be hospitalized as soon as possible to overcome the pain. Ichikawa was reluctant to follow her words,
expecting time to heal everything. But one sunny day in December she suddenly took tablets. She
could not live on without her dearest sons.
Ichikawa was truly at a loss. It took him several weeks, naturally, before he could at lastencourage himself to go back to his daily life, and fulfill his duties. Mieko, now the only family
member left alive, swore to herself to live on and to let her poor father live on. A year later a booklet
Tamuke-no-hana-taba (1945), a heartfelt tribute to Haruko and San’ei, was compiled in spite of
every difficulty in wartime and distributed to relatives and close friends.
To cheer him up they persuaded him to remarry. He felt seemingly so lonely that he, just a
few months after Haruko’s death, agreed to tie the knot with Fuji Kōno (河野不二, 1899–1955), also
called Fujiko (不二子), who studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, andworked at the library there. She had once married an ornithologist, but she soon ran away because
the husband turned out to have a bizarre habit of letting innumerable birds loose all over the house. A
bit like the Hitchcock movie.

20Fuji was a cheerful woman who enjoyed mountaineering and alpine flower painting, whichapparently pleased Ichikawa, who adored the beauty of highlands as well as insects and plants there.
Together they would travel, visit hot springs, and go up mountains all over Japan, besides spending
every summer in Kita-Karuizawa, in the course of which he slowly regained his strength to go on.
And Mieko never left him. She lived first with him and then, after her marriage, next tohim, dismantling his favorite house in Kita-Yamabushi-chō and reconstructing it there. Her
bridegroom was Yōzō Nogami (野上燿三, 1918–2008), nuclear physicist, the third son of Yaeko (弥生子 , 1885–1985), famous novelist, and Toyoichirō ( 豊一郎 , 1883–1950), scholar of English

literature and Ichikawa’s old mate. Soon Ichikawa had his one and only granddaughter Michiko (三千子, 1946–). Some careless man mistook her for Ichikawa and Fuji’s newborn baby. Mieko was

glad, rather than annoyed, to hear the false rumor and was about to trick him by telling him that
Ichikawa named the baby “Rikuzō” commemorating his age of 63, as the number could be so read.
Friends came around. Doi, the ex-housemate, in particular, kept in close touch and would
often come to see if his old friend was in good shape. His favorite bedroom at Ichikawa’s was thelatter’s study upstairs. When his duties at Sendai were over, he moved to live within walking
distance so that they could call on each other whenever they wanted to.
Ex-students, too, often dropped in to cheer up their old master. Every new year saw theregular meeting of Shōhachi-kai (昭八会). Graduates in the eighth year of Shōwa era, i.e. 1933, got
together at Ichikawa’s to celebrate the New Year and his coming birthday in February. Not only theaged Ichikawa but also his whole family had a good time with those compassionate disciples.
Supported and loved by everyone around, Ichikawa accomplished all his duties at theuniversity, kindly declined offers from seven other universities, and started his peaceful retired life.
But after ten years of remarriage he suddenly lost Fuji, who chose to poison herself. It was adeliberate act, brought about, as Michiko deduces, by some melancholic sense of alienation that she
had accumulated at seeing the perfect harmony that her husband shared with relatives and friends.
He, as a matter of course, must have suffered a great deal from the loss. As a tribute to Fuji
he published her writings on mountaineering in two volumes, Yama-michi-no-tabi (1956) and Zokuyama-michi-no-tabi (1957), editing all the drafts she left behind.
Deprived of a better half again, Ichikawa was getting lonely, though right next door lived
his dearest daughter and her family, who were always ready to help him in any way and came to see
him every single day.
He walked and walked. That was what he had forced himself to do since Oxford days. He
had no particular destination in mind. Sometimes he called on Doi and others on the way when hehappened to find himself near their houses. Dressed in Japanese clothes, with geta or wooden clogs
on, he did not just stroll around, but marched along at a high pace. Yoshio Ogawa (小川芳男, 1908–
1990), who lived in the neighborhood, sometimes caught him walking and cheerfully greeted him

21every time, but he, allegedly, would usually walk away without noticing Ogawa.
In his last years he was getting senile and forgetful. He confessed sadly that he did notremember certain plant names any more. During his daily walks he lost his way at least twice, oncein Seijō, then in Kita-Karuizawa. After that, whenever he went out, he was accompanied by relatives
or students near by. One day in a taxi on the way back from Go-Ken, he suddenly asked who his
fellow passenger was. The latter was Ogawa, one of his successors in the organization, and they had
known each other for several decades. Michiko remembers the evening when the untalkative
Ichikawa opened his mouth over his favorite vermouth. People from back in the day, he said,
appeared from time to time lately, but soon disappeared. Everybody saw that his days were coming
to an end. Surely he longed desperately to see Haruko, San’ei, San’ai, Fuji, San’yō, Sanroku, Yone,
Sanken, Lawrence, and deceased schoolmates among others.
Hospitalized for pneumonia, a bit like his master Lawrence fifty-odd years before, theweakened Ichikawa sadly closed his 84-year life, surrounded by relatives, before dawn on March 17,
1970. To the father of English philology in Japan were dedicated two consecutive numbers of
Eigo-Seinen and a Bulletin of Go-Ken, to which over seventy scholars in all contributed, praying forhis soul to rest in peace. There appeared two necrologies by Nakajima, his successor at Tokyo, in
Gengo-Kenkyū and Studies in English Literature, edited and published by The Linguistic Society ofJapan and The English Literary Society of Japan respectively.
In closing I would like to express my hearty thanks to Ichikawa’s one and only granddaughter Michiko Hasegawa (長谷川三千子), professor emeritus at Saitama University, for fully
understanding the significance of summing up and surveying the life and achievements of thebiggest figure in the study of English in Japan. Without her kind cooperation, this modest work, to befollowed by his full life story in Japanese, could have contained inaccuracies.
May Ichikawa live for ever in the further development of historical as well as other studies
of English. Requiescat in pace.
April 14, 201922