As a boy, he helped his grandmother collect food from neighbours’ rubbish bins in a hand-drawn cart to feed his father’s pigs.
Nevertheless, he developed a strong belief in his own potential. “I began to think I shouldn’t be content with being ordinary, that maybe I was a genius,” he later told his biographer, Atsuo Inoue.
At the age of 16, he went to California to learn English and enrolled in Serramonte High School, south of San Francisco.
