Takaaki Yoshimoto (1924–2012) was a Japanese poet, literary critic, and thinker. Born in Tsukishima, Tokyo, he graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and began writing poetry and criticism while working in industry. He criticized writers who obscured their wartime responsibility and established left-wing movements that subordinated individual thought to political organizations, influencing the student movements and New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. In his representative work “Kyodo Gensoron” (A Theory of Collective Fantasy), Yoshimoto distinguishes among individual fantasy, pair fantasy, and collective fantasy to explain how families, religions, and states are sustained by shared forms of consciousness extending beyond the individual.