Family Background
Yamamoto was born as Isoroku Takano (高野 五十六, Takano Isoroku?) in Nagaoka, Niigata. His father was Takano Sadayoshi (高野 貞吉, Takano Sadayoshi?), an intermediate samurai of the Nagaoka Domain. "Isoroku" is an old Japanese term meaning "56"; the name referred to his father's age at Isoroku's birth.
In 1916, Isoroku was adopted into the Yamamoto family (another family of former Nagaoka samurai) and took the Yamamoto name. It was a common practice for Japanese families lacking sons to adopt suitable young men in this fashion to carry on the family name. In 1918 Isoroku married Reiko Mihashi, with whom he had two sons and two daughters.
Read more about this topic: Isoroku Yamamoto
Famous quotes containing the words family and/or background:
“With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.”
—Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)