Arishima Takeo grew up in the port city of Yokohama, where his father was head of the customs office, and from an early age he mingled freely with westerners. He attended a mission school until 1887, when he returned to Tokyo to enter the aristocratic Gakushuin, or Peers School, which was established for the children of the Meiji elite. Students from this background normally continued their educations at Tokyo University, but in 1896 Arishima chose to attend the Sapporo Agricultural College on the northern island of Hokkaid.
Arishima converted to Christianity in Sapporo, and from 1903 to 1907 he made the customary tour abroad, which he spent mainly as a student in the United States. After graduating with a master's degree from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, he returned to Sapporo to teach English and marry Kamio Yasuko, another Christian, who bore him three sons before dying of tuberculosis in 1916. Following the deaths of his wife and of his father in that same year Arishima left his university post and became a full-time writer. His experience in the United States had left Arishima disgusted with the hypocrisy of the Christian church. Socialism, he believed, provided a far more effective conscience than Christianity, and although he retained some Christian ideas throughout his life, he had become unable to accept the doctrine of atonement.
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