 From his early teens, he started to contribute poems to literary magazines and had his "tanka" verse published in the literary journals "Bunkō", "Shinsei" and "Myōjō".His mother bought him his first mandolin in the summer of 1903.After spending a futile five semesters as a freshman at two national universities, he dropped out of school, living for a period in Okayama and Kumamoto.