[2] With a few noted exceptions,[a] however, these works tended to be, as Japanese literary historian and critic Donald Keene wrote, "immature and sentimental".
[2] Tane maku Hito's founder, Ōmi Komaki, a young man from Tsuchizaki (土崎, a small town in Akita Prefecture), studied in France as a teenager, and he spent World War I there.
[3] The first Tane maku Hito was founded by Komaki and his friends Yōbun Kaneko (金子洋文) Kenzō Imano (今野賢三) and others in Tsuchizaki in February 1921,[4] and lasted for a scant three issues.
[1] Its final issue, as well as the supplement Tane-maki Ki (種蒔き記), were heavily critical of the massacre of Koreans and socialists in the aftermath of the earthquake.
[3] Each issue of Tane maku Hito included an "oath" that, in (perhaps deliberately) obscure language, expressed apparent support of the Russian Revolution.