Chōgorō Kaionji

Chōgorō Kaionji (海音寺潮五郎) was the pen-name of Tosaku Suetomi (末富 東作), a Japanese author. Noted for his historical fiction novels, he was active during the Shōwa period of Japan.

Early life
Chōgorō was born in present-day Okuchi city Kagoshima Prefecture. He was a voracious reader as a youth, and although it was forbidden to read books on school grounds outside of the classroom, he would sneak books out of the library and read in secret on the school roof.

Literary career
After graduating from Kokugakuin University, he 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 (Bad Luck).

Kaionji moved to Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture from Kyoto in 1934, when he made a resolution to pursue a career as a professional writer. He won the prestigious Naoki Prize in 1936 with Tensho Onna Gassen ("Tensho Women's Battle"), about the life of the tea master Sen no Rikyu and his daughter Ogin. He followed this with Budo Denraiki ("Samurai Chronicles") and other works with a similar medieval warrior theme, which were serialized in newspapers.

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 (1990 film)", 1960-1962), which formed the basis of some equally epic movies. He won the 16th Kikuchi Prize in 1968, and was made a member of the review committee for the Naoki Prize in 1970.

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 Saigō Takamori, which he failed to complete due to his death of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1977.

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