was a Japanese poet

Japanese poetry

Japanese poets first encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang Dynasty. It took them several hundred years to digest the foreign impact, make it a part of their culture and merge it with their literary tradition in their mother tongue, and begin to develop the diversity of their native poetry. For...

 and sculptor.

Biography

Kōtarō was the son of Takamura Kōun, a renowned Japanese sculptor.

He graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1902, where he studied sculpture. He studied in New York in 1906, London in 1907, and in Paris in 1908, returning to Japan in 1909, and lived there for the rest of his life.

His sculptural work shows strong influence both from Western work (especially Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin

François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

, whom he idolized) and from Japanese traditions.

He is also famous for his poems, and especially for his 1941 collection Chiekoshō (智恵子抄 literally "Selections of Chieko", in English titled Chieko's sky after one of the poems therein), a collection of poems about his wife Chieko Takamura

Chieko Takamura

was a Japanese poet.- Biography :She was born in what is now Adachi-gun, Fukushima Prefecture as Chieko Naganuma, the eldest of six daughters and two sons.In 1903, she went to the Japan Women's University in Tokyo, and graduated in 1907....

, who died in 1938.

Published works

• Chieko's sky, 1941 (English translation 1978) - ISBN 0-87011-313-5 (English)
• The Chieko poems, bilingual edition, 2005 - ISBN 1-931243-97-2