“To read is to transcribe. If you only read, you will forget, but if you transcribe you will remember.”

Kumagusu was born on May 18, 1867 in a castle town of the Kishū Domain, now Wakayama Prefecture. His father was a metal utensils merchant. His name was granted to him at Fujishiro Shrine, which was believed to be a shrine that protected children. Fujishiro Shrine is a pillar for Kumano beliefs, and a huge, sacred camphor tree stands in the middle of its grounds. Each of Kumagusu’s siblings’ names used a character relative to the shrine, and Kumagusu’s name includes the character “kuma” (熊) from “Kumano” region, and “gusu”(楠), the character for camphor trees.

According to Kumagusu himself, his family was the richest in Wakayama City and the fifth richest in Wakayama Prefecture. However, his father’s fortune had fallen into ruins when he married his wife, whose family adopted him upon marriage. He worked hard to rebuild his business during his lifetime and made sure his children understood the importance of saving money. Since Kumagusu didn’t have money to buy books as a child, when a neighbor showed him the Wakan Sansai Zue, a 105-volume encyclopedia, he decided to commit it all to memory and became absorbed in reading it.

The encyclopedia contained information about everything that existed in the universe, and it was written entirely in kanji. Remarkably, Kumagusu was only eight years old when he began to copy every page of the encyclopedia. The original notebook in which he wrote his transcriptions still exists to this day. Who would have thought that this would be the very beginnings of Kumagusu’s life work?