 Hayashi returned to Kamakura, where he lived for the remainder of his life, and officially renounced all connections to the proletarian literature movement in 1936.With the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he was also sent to China together with a number of other leading writers (including Eiji Yoshikawa, Nobuko Yoshiya, Kunio Kishida, and Tatsuzō Ishikawa) to be embedded within the Imperial Japanese Army, to write reports and stories supporting the war effort.In 1943, Hayashi toured Korea, Manchukuo and Japanese-occupied north China as a member of the Literary Home-Front Campaign ("Bungei Jugo Undo"), a speech-making troupe organized to promote patriotism and support for the war.