If rivers preoccupied Tanaka Shōzō during the last part of his life, they marked Ishikawa Sanshirō's childhood years. San’ōdō, the village where he was born on 23 May 1876, is located in the upper reaches of the majestic Tone River, Japan's second longest waterway. Today it is part of Honjō in Saitama Prefecture, a sprawling city on the Kantō plain which is about one-and-a-half hours from Tokyo by train, and seems forever locked in the sleepiness of the post-1980s bubble years. At the time of Ishikawa's birth, however, the area was a bustling transportation hub. During the Tokugawa era, the Tone constituted an inland water link that served Edo, the capital, and was still central to the region's distribution network at the beginning of the Meiji era.

Ishikawa's house lay not far from the banks of the river, and his father's business, a boat wholesaling operation which enjoyed special commercial privileges granted by the Tokugawa government, was a source of work for most of the residents in the area. But in May 1884 a railway line opened between Takasaki in the eastern Kantō region and Tokyo, as Edo had been renamed. The new rail network, one of the pillars of the fukoku kyōhei (rich country, strong army) programme, dramatically reduced the need for river transport, eventually forcing Ishikawa's father and the villagers he employed out of business. Less than twenty years into the Meiji period the river started to flow empty. As Ishikawa recalled, “the new venture of the new civilisation caused the collapse of our house and village”. A subsequent attempt to re-enter the freight business failed, but still the father managed to keep providing for his son's education.

Ishikawa's comments highlight that the post-Restoration years were undeniably tumultuous and life-changing for large swathes of the Japanese population. Although he belonged to a respectable and well-established family, he experienced near destitution as a youth, which indicates that modernisation very quickly affected all levels of society. Historians have shown that the Meiji reforms had an impact not only on merchants but, even more acutely, on a great proportion of the farming population.