were at the Cherry Lawn School in Connecticut, then at Oakwood Friends School in New York.  In 1963, Yosh joined the English Department at Plymouth-Carver Regional High School, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  Yosh remained at PCHS for 28 years, playing a key role in developing the high school English curriculum and offering path-breaking--and, at the time, controversial--classes in visual culture, filmmaking, and Black Culture, in addition to American Literature.

 

A fierce advocate of freedom of thought, Yosh once publicly defended the teaching of J.D. Salinger's book, Catcher in the Rye, against would-be school censors.  He was a widely respected and admired teacher who sought to educate his students about the human condition in all its complexities and contradictions.  Former students speak of the enormous impact he had on their lives. 

 

Throughout his life, Yosh was a passionate advocate for social justice who identified with the most vulnerable in society.  He taught inmates at a local prison and was an active supporter of Native American causes.  He was one of the figures involved in the Parting Ways archaeological project in Plymouth, to preserve and publicize traces of one of the earliest African-American communities of freed slaves, dating back to early colonial times (see James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten:  The Archaeology of Early American Life).  A patriot in the mold of Mark Twain (whom he admired and whose work he taught in the classroom), Yosh loved his country but resisted its war-making.  

 

After retiring from the Plymouth schools, Yosh became a full-time artist, concentrating on political and social themes.  He received a Masters in Fine Art from Bridgewater State College and studied at the Massachusetts College of Art.  He was involved in promoting political art in the New England region for fifteen years.  In the 1990s, Yosh was one of the co-organizers of Dave's Art Gallery, a political art gallery in Cambridge, and founder of the Gallery of Social & Political Art at the Community Church of Boston.  In 2004, a retrospective of Yosh's ouevre was held at the Church, encompassing some 60 individual pieces.

 

Yosh maintained an extensive personal library of thousands of books.  Among the writers and thinkers he felt a particularly strong affinity with were the Transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau) satirist Mark Twain, oral historian Studs Terkel, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among many others.

 

Yosh put family above all else.  He was happiest when biking or kayaking with his partner, or camping or going to the beach with family.  He was a loving and unusually involved and devoted father and grandfather, never too busy to help his children with their math homework, to read their poetry, or to create sand sculptures for them at the beach (including life-sized cars they could sit in).  He hand-crafted dollhouses for each of his daughters, replete with wall-papered rooms, carved banisters, and a working doorbell. 

 

Yosh is remembered by all who knew him as a legendary teacher, impassioned artist, a loving father, grandfather, husband, and helpmate, and as a man of great dignity and moral seriousness who nonetheless retained his sense of playfulness, good humor, compassion, and humility to the last of his days.  He was a modest man of more than modest accomplishments. 

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Yoshiro Sanbonmatsu died in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the evening of October 22, 2017.  He is survived by his partner, three children and a step-son, four grandchildren, and his former wife.