Ōuchi Takao was born on 8 April 1907 and died on 10 February 1980. He was a Japanese translator and writer, his original name was Yamaguchi Shinichi 山口慎一, pen names included Xu Huangyang徐晃阳, and Ōuchi Takako 大內高子.
He was born in Yanaghe 柳河 (now Yanagawa 柳川) in Fukuoka 福岡prefecture, Japan and went to Changchun when young. After graduating from the (South) Manchuria Railway (SMR) Business School 滿鐵商業學校 (established 1923), he was admitted to Shanghai’s DongYa Tongwen Shuyuan 東亞同文書院 (East Asia School of Common Literature) (established 1901). At that time, he knew Yu Dafu 郁达夫 (1896 –1945), a modern Chinese short story writer and poet and Tian Han 田汉 (1898 –1968). The “Yamaguchi” of Yu Dafu’s “Public Sentence to Japan Yamaguchi” 公開信回答日本山口is Ōuchi. He graduated in 1929 and began to work for the SMR. At the same time, he participated in the Manzhou Pinglun 滿洲評論 (Manchuria review), translated left-wing political and economic papers (including papers by communist organizer Zhu Qihua 朱其华 (1907-1945), and served as the head of the literature and art department of the Manzhou Yinghua Xiehui滿洲映畫協會(Manchuria Film Association). However, he was dismissed because he was arrested on suspicion of leftist activities. Then, he began to translate Manchurian authors, including Gu Ding, Jue Qing, Xiao Song, and Yi Chi. His work, partly translated by Wang Wenshi 王文石into “20 Years of Northeast Literature” (東北文學20年), was published in the first series of Dongbei xiandai wenxue shiliao (东北现代文学史料 / Northeast Modern Literature Historical Materials) in March 1980.
– Norman Smith
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