Great men will, often thanks to their depredations, force themselves on our attention.
The fishermen, farmers, hunters, wanderers, carpenters and others about whom ethnologist Miyamoto Tsuneichi writes in "The Forgotten Japanese" are, on the other hand, more discreet. Those eager to recover the history they made, a history from which "great men' are distant, need to go to them, and this Miyamoto did.
He walked, translator Jeffrey S. Irish tells us, "one hundred thousand miles in search of the meaning of life in rural Japan." Whether he found "the meaning of life" is an open question, but he certainly found life and was able to observe it and report on it with a rare clarity.