Chōgorō Kaionji

Chōgorō Kaionji (海音寺 潮五郎, Kaionji Chōgorō, 5 November 1901 – 1 December 1977) was the pen-name of Tōsaku Suetomi (末富 東作, Suetomi Tōsaku), a Japanese author. Noted for his

Chōgorō was born in present-day

Chōgorō began writing fiction while teaching at a junior high school, at first in his native Kagoshima, and later in Kyoto. His early novel Utakata Zoshi (Transient Notes) won prizes a contest run by the Mainichi Shimbun weekly magazine, Sunday Mainichi in 1929, and he repeated this feat in 1932 with his second novel Fuun (Wind and Clouds).

Kaionji moved to

With the start of the Pacific War, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941, and served for a year in Malaya. Life in the army did not agree with him, and he returned to Japan in 1942 on medical leave, which he managed to stretch out for the next three years until the end of the war.

In the postwar years, he completed epic historical novels such as Moko Kitaru (Mongol Attack), Taira no Masakado and Ten to Chi to ("Heaven and Earth", 1960–1962), which formed the basis of some equally epic movies. He won the 16th Kikuchi Kan Prize in 1968, and was made a member of the review committee for the Naoki Prize in 1970.

In 1973, he was designated a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government. He won the Academy of Arts Prize in 1976.

While writing TV dramas on the side, he contributed to the field of historical/biographical novels with Busho Retsuden ("Biographies of Warriors") and Akunin Retsuden ("Biographies of Villains"). He considered his life's work to be a biography of

His grave is at the Tsukiji Hongan-ji in Tokyo.

• Japanese literature
• List of Japanese writers

• Frédéric, Louis. Japan Encyclopedia. Harvard University Press (2002),
  ISBN 0674017536

• Literary Figures of Kamakura