22 Facts About Yone Noguchi

Yonejiro Noguchi was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in both English and Japanese.

Yone Noguchi was the father of noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Yone Noguchi attended Keio University in Tokyo, where he was exposed to the works of Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer, and expressed interests in haiku and Zen.

Yone Noguchi lived for a time in the home of Shiga Shigetaka, editor of the magazine Nihonjin, but left before graduating to travel to San Francisco in November 1893.

Yone Noguchi spent some months at Palo Alto, California studying at a preparatory school for Stanford University but returned to journalistic work in San Francisco during the Sino-Japanese War.

Miller welcomed and encouraged Yone Noguchi and introduced him to other San Francisco Bay area bohemians, including Gelett Burgess, Ina Coolbrith, Edwin Markham, Adeline Knapp, Blanche Partington, and Charles Warren Stoddard.

Yone Noguchi weathered a plagiarism scandal in 1896 to publish two books of poetry in 1897, and remained an important fixture of the Bay Area literary scene until his departure to the East Coast in May 1900.

Yone Noguchi then sailed to England, where he published and promoted his third book of poetry, From the Eastern Sea, and formed connections with leading literary figures like William Michael Rossetti, Laurence Binyon, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Laurence Housman, Arthur Symons and the young Arthur Ransome.

Yone Noguchi's situation changed dramatically with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, as his writings on various aspects of Japanese culture were suddenly in great demand among magazine and newspaper editors.

Yone Noguchi had begun an amorous correspondence with Stoddard while still in California, and acknowledged that they slept in the same bed when he visited Stoddard in Washington, DC, in 1900.

Yone Noguchi had met Ethel Armes at Stoddard's by Christmas 1901.

Yone Noguchi had hired Leonie Gilmour as an English teacher and editor in February 1901.

Yone Noguchi returned to Japan in August 1904, and became a professor of English at his alma mater Keio University the following year, but his marriage plans were spoiled when it became known that Leonie Gilmour had given birth to Yone Noguchi's son in Los Angeles.

Yone Noguchi moved to the Koishikawa neighborhood of Tokyo in November 1905, and published an anthology of prose poetry in English, The Summer Cloud, shortly thereafter.

From November 1906 to January 1908, Yone Noguchi wrote a literary criticism column almost every week for the Japan Times, among the more notable of which was the November 3,1907 "Mr Yeats and the No," advising William Butler Yeats to study the Noh drama.

Yone Noguchi continued to publish extensively in English after his return to Japan, becoming a leading interpreter of Japanese culture to Westerners, and of Western culture to the Japanese.

Yone Noguchi's 1909 poem collection, The Pilgrimage, was widely admired, as was a 1913 collection of essays, Through the Torii.

Yone Noguchi traveled back to Japan via Berlin and Moscow using the Trans-Siberian Railway.

All of Noguchi's later books, in both Japanese and English, were published in Japan, for Noguchi encountered stiff resistance from American and British publishers in the 1930s, despite the support of a few sympathetic editors like Moore and R A Scott-James.

Yone Noguchi was hailed in the pages of Poetry as a pioneering modernist, thanks to his early advocacy of free verse and association with modernist writers like Yeats, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher.

Yone Noguchi has recently gained attention in Asian American studies due to the increasing interest in transnationalism.

Yone Noguchi is played by Nakamura Shido II in the film Leonie.