Usui Kojima

Who They Were

Usui Kojima (小島 烏水, Kojima Usui) was a Japanese writer, mountaineer and art collector born in Yokohama on 29 December 1873 and died on 13 December 1948. He worked across an unusually wide range of fields: he was a literary critic, an art historian, an art collector, a banker and a philologist, as well as a writer and a mountaineer. He wrote more than twenty books.

His life began in the sixth year of the Meiji era (明治, Meiji, the reign name of the emperor who ruled from 1868 to 1912), a period when Japan was rapidly reorganising its institutions, its industries and its cultural life along Western lines. Kojima belongs to the generation that came of age inside that transformation.

Life and Career

Kojima was born in Yokohama, the port city south of Tokyo that had been opened to foreign trade in the 1850s and was, by the 1870s, Japan's main window onto the outside world. Growing up there placed him in contact with imported ideas and imported goods from childhood.

He earned his living in banking, a career that ran alongside, rather than instead of, his writing and scholarship. His published work spanned literary criticism, art history and philology — the study of language and texts — and he produced over twenty books across these subjects.

His collecting focused on ukiyo-e (浮世絵, ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world"), the woodblock prints and paintings that flourished in Japan's cities from the seventeenth century onward. Kojima assembled a collection of more than nine hundred ukiyo-e prints. As an art historian he wrote about this material rather than merely accumulating it, treating popular print culture as a subject worthy of serious study.

His other lasting commitment was to mountains. Kojima was a mountaineer in an era when climbing in Japan was not yet organised as a recreational or intellectual pursuit, and he established Japan's first mountaineering society. That society gave Japanese climbing a formal structure: a body through which routes, observations and writing about mountains could be shared.

He died on 13 December 1948, sixteen days short of his seventy-fifth birthday.

Why They Matter

Kojima's importance rests on two things he helped to create where nothing had existed before.

The first is Japanese mountaineering as a written and organised culture. By founding Japan's first mountaineering society, he turned scattered individual excursions into a collective enterprise with a membership, a purpose and a record. His own writing gave that enterprise a literary voice, describing mountains in prose at a time when the Japanese Alps were still being surveyed and named for a modern audience.

The second is the serious study of ukiyo-e. A collection of more than nine hundred prints is not a casual accumulation; it is an archive. Combined with his work as an art historian and critic, it represents an argument that the woodblock prints of the Edo period deserved the same scholarly attention as older, more conventionally prestigious forms of Japanese art. That argument is now standard, but it was not when Kojima was making it.

He also illustrates a particular Meiji type: the professional man — in his case a banker — who pursued scholarship and collecting with the same discipline he brought to his employment. His career shows how much of Japan's modern cultural infrastructure was built by people working outside the academy.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 小島烏水 and read in kana as こじま うすい. In romaji it is Kojima Usui, with the family name first, as is standard in Japanese.

小島 (こじま, Kojima) — the surname, made of two characters:

• 小 (こ, ko) — "small", "little". A very common element in Japanese surnames.
• 島 (じま, jima) — "island". The character's base reading is しま (shima); here it voices to じま (jima) in the middle of the compound, a regular sound change in Japanese word formation.

So the surname means something like "small island".

烏水 (うすい, Usui) — the given name, also two characters:

• 烏 (う, u) — "crow", "raven"; also used for "black". This is the character for the bird, not the similar-looking 鳥 (とり, tori), which means "bird" generally.
• 水 (すい, sui) — "water". Its native Japanese reading is みず (mizu); すい (sui) is the Sino-Japanese reading, used here in the compound.

Together the given name reads as "crow water" or "black water". The choice of 烏 rather than the plainer 鳥 gives the name a deliberately literary, slightly archaic flavour — fitting for a man who wrote for a living.

Note that the pen name and the legal name are the same here: 小島烏水 is how he is known in Japanese, and the kana reading こじま うすい is what a Japanese reader would say aloud.

Legacy

Kojima's mountaineering society outlived him and became part of the institutional foundation of climbing in Japan. The idea that mountains are a subject for literature, not just for travel, is one he helped to establish, and later Japanese nature writing builds on that ground.

His ukiyo-e collection — over nine hundred prints — preserved a body of popular art that was, in his lifetime, still often treated as disposable. As an art historian and collector he helped shift ukiyo-e from souvenir to subject.

His more than twenty books, spanning literary criticism, art history and philology, remain the record of a Meiji-era intellectual who refused to specialise. He died in 1948, having spent his working life in a bank and his real life in libraries, print shops and mountains.