A question often asked of Professor Ryozo Tanaka is "What made you so keen on English culture and tradition?"
To answer, he digs into his memories for "the deep structure of my Anglophilia." He said, "I spent my infancy in wartime, during the Japanese-Chinese War and World War II. My earliest memory is of Tenny son's 'Enoch Arden,' which my father used to read at supper time. I remember the books on my father's bookshelf, volumes by Ruskin, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson. They were the beginning."
At Azabu secondary school in the early postwar years, Tanaka continued his immersion in English. "One of my teachers kept encouraging me to read at random as many great English literary works as possible, whether I understood them or not," he said. "That urging helped me, and still does even today."