Kiyoshi Yamashita

His work is still highly regarded throughout Japan, and is the subject of frequent exhibitions. His life was portrayed in a long-running Japanese television drama, Hadaka no Taishō Hōrōki (裸の大将放浪記, The Wandering Record of The Naked General), which ran from 1980 to 1997.

At the age of 21, staff from the institution found him helping in a restaurant and forced him to take the recruitment exam. Eventually he was considered exempt from service. The events from this time were recorded in his “Wandering Diary” of 1956, and the most popular image of Yamashita travelling alone through the country with his rucksack comes from this period.

In the post-war period, he became widely known as the “Japanese Van Gogh” or the “Naked General” (due to his habit of wearing a sleeveless undershirt in his travels). In 1956, the Kiyoshi Yamashita Exhibition opened at the Daimaru store in Tokyo, and toured the country, stopping at 130 places in Japan and attracting over 500,000 visitors. In June 1961, Yamashita and Shikiba embarked on a 40-day tour of Europe. Here he recorded the many famous places and monuments he saw.

Tiring of life at the institution, and in order to avoid the mandatory physical examination for recruitment into the Imperial Japanese Army, Yamashita ran away in 1940 to start his wandering around Japan, which would last until 1954.

Kiyoshi Yamashita (山下 清, Yamashita Kiyoshi (born Seiji Obashi, 10 March 1922 – 12 July 1971) was a Japanese artist. He is famous for his wanderings throughout Japan, during which he often wore a sleeveless undershirt, garnering the nickname "The Naked General."