Yone Noguchi, or Yonejirō Noguchi, born 野口 米次郎 / Noguchi Yonejirō (December 8, 1875 - July 13, 1947), was an influential Japanese

Japanese people

The are an ethnic group originating in the Japanese archipelago and are the predominant ethnic group of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 130 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 127 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries...

 writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism in both English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 and Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

. He was the father of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi

was a prominent Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces,...

.

Early life

Noguchi was born in the town of Tsushima

Tsushima, Aichi

is a city located in Aichi Prefecture in the Chūbu region of Japan.As of April 1, 2011, the city has an estimated population of 66,448, with a household number of 25,398, and the density of 2,649.44 persons per km². The total area is 25.08 km²....

, near Nagoya. He attended Keio University

Keio University

,abbreviated as Keio or Keidai , is a Japanese university located in Minato, Tokyo. It is known as the oldest institute of higher education in Japan. Founder Fukuzawa Yukichi originally established it as a school for Western studies in 1858 in Edo . It has eleven campuses in Tokyo and Kanagawa...

 but left before graduating to travel to San Francisco in 1893. There, Noguchi joined a newspaper run by Japanese exiles associated with the Freedom and People's Rights Movement

Freedom and People's Rights Movement

The was a Japanese political and social movement for democracy in 1880s....

 and worked as a domestic servant. He spent some months studying at a preparatory school for Stanford and working as a journalist before determining, after a visit to the Oakland hillside home

Joaquin Miller Park

Joaquin Miller Park is a large open space park in the Oakland Hills owned and operated by the city of Oakland, California. It was named after early California writer and poet Joaquin Miller, who lived here in his house "The Hights", now preserved as the Joaquin Miller House.-Park:The park's are...

 of Joaquin Miller

Joaquin Miller

Joaquin Miller was the pen name of the colorful American poet Cincinnatus Heine Miller , nicknamed the "Poet of the Sierras".-Early years and family:...

, his true vocation of poet. Miller welcomed and encouraged Noguchi and introduced him to other San Francisco Bay area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

 bohemians

Bohemianism

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...

, including Gelett Burgess

Gelett Burgess

Frank Gelett Burgess was an artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, The Lark, he is best known as a writer of nonsense verse...

 (who published Noguchi's first verses in his magazine, The Lark), Ina Coolbrith

Ina Coolbrith

Ina Donna Coolbrith was an American poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community...

, Edwin Markham

Edwin Markham

Charles Edwin Anson Markham was an American poet. From 1923 to 1931 he was Poet Laureate of Oregon.-Life:Edwin Markham was born in Oregon City, Oregon and was the youngest of 10 children; his parents divorced shortly after his birth...

, Adeline Knapp

Adeline Knapp

Adeline E. Knapp was an American journalist, author, social activist, environmentalist and educator, who is today remembered largely for her tempestuous lesbian relationship with Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In her lifetime, Knapp was known as a fixture of the turn-of-the-century San Francisco Bay...

, Blanche Partington

Blanche Partington

Blanche Partington was a prominent San Francisco journalist and member of the San Francisco Bay Area literary and cultural scene...

, and Charles Warren Stoddard

Charles Warren Stoddard

Charles Warren Stoddard was an American author and editor.-Life and works:Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York on August 7, 1843. He was descended in a direct line from Anthony Stoddard of England, who settled at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1639...

. Noguchi weathered a plagiarism

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

 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 for the East Coast

East Coast of the United States

The East Coast of the United States, also known as the Eastern Seaboard, refers to the easternmost coastal states in the United States, which touch the Atlantic Ocean and stretch up to Canada. The term includes the U.S...

 in 1900.

Career

From 1900 to 1904, Noguchi's primarily base was New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. There, with the help of Leonie Gilmour

Léonie Gilmour

Léonie Gilmour was an American educator, editor, and journalist. She was the lover and editor of the writer Yone Noguchi and the mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi and dancer Ailes Gilmour...

, he completed work on his first novel, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl

The American Diary of a Japanese Girl

The American Diary of a Japanese Girl is the first English novel published in the United States by a person of Japanese ancestry. Acquired for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Monthly Magazine by editor Ellery Sedgwick in 1901, it appeared in two excerpted installments in November and December of that...

, and a sequel, The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid. He then sailed to England, where he self-published and promoted his third book of poetry, From the Eastern Sea, and formed connections with leading literary figures like William Michael Rossetti

William Michael Rossetti

William Michael Rossetti was an English writer and critic.-Biography:Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.He was one of the seven founder members of the...

, Laurence Binyon

Laurence Binyon

Robert Laurence Binyon was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. His most famous work, For the Fallen, is well known for being used in Remembrance Sunday services....

, William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

, Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

, Laurence Housman

Laurence Housman

Laurence Housman was an English playwright, writer and illustrator.-Early life:Laurence Housman was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, one of seven children who included the poet A. E. Housman and writer Clemence Housman. In 1871 his mother died, and his father remarried, to a cousin...

, Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons

Arthur William Symons , was a British poet, critic and magazine editor.-Life:Born in Milford Haven, Wales, of Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy...

 and the young Arthur Ransome

Arthur Ransome

Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist, best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. These tell of school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. Many of the books involve sailing; other common subjects...

. His London success brought some attention on his return to New York in 1903, and he formed productive new friendships with American writers like Edmund Clarence Stedman

Edmund Clarence Stedman

Edmund Clarence Stedman , American poet, critic, and essayist was born at Hartford, Connecticut, United States.-Biography:...

, Zona Gale

Zona Gale

Zona Gale was an American author and playwright. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, in 1921.-Biography:Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, which she often used as a setting in her writing...

, and even Mary MacLane

Mary MacLane

Mary MacLane was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing...

, but he continued to have difficulty publishing in the United States. This changed with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War

Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War was "the first great war of the 20th century." It grew out of rival imperial ambitions of the Russian Empire and Japanese Empire over Manchuria and Korea...

 in 1904, when Noguchi's writings on various aspects of Japanese culture were suddenly in great demand among magazine editors. He was able to publish a number of seminal articles at this time, including "A Proposal to American Poets," in which he advised American poets to "try Japanese hokku

Hokku

is the opening stanza of a Japanese orthodox collaborative linked poem, renga, or of its later derivative, renku . From the time of Matsuo Bashō , the hokku began to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun , and haiga...

."

Having (he thought) ended a brief, secret marriage to Leonie Gilmour

Léonie Gilmour

Léonie Gilmour was an American educator, editor, and journalist. She was the lover and editor of the writer Yone Noguchi and the mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi and dancer Ailes Gilmour...

 in the early months of 1904, Noguchi made plans to return to Japan, with the intention of marrying another romantic interest, Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes

Ethel Armes

Ethel Marie Armes was an American journalist and historian.Daughter of Col. George Augustus Armes and Lucy Hamilton Kerr, the daughter of John Bozman Kerr, Ethel was brought up in Washington, D.C. where she attended private schools and later worked as a reporter for the Washington Post...

. He returned to Japan in August 1904, and became a professor of English at his alma mater, Keio Gijuku, the following year, but his marriage plan was spoiled when it became known that Leonie Gilmour

Léonie Gilmour

Léonie Gilmour was an American educator, editor, and journalist. She was the lover and editor of the writer Yone Noguchi and the mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi and dancer Ailes Gilmour...

 had given birth to Noguchi's son (the future sculptor Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi

was a prominent Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces,...

) in Los Angeles. In 1907, Leonie and Isamu joined Noguchi in Tokyo, but the reunion proved short-lived, mainly because Noguchi had already acquired a Japanese wife before their arrival. He and Leonie separated for good in 1909, although Leonie and Isamu continued to live in Japan.

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. His 1909 poem collection, The Pilgrimage, was widely admired, as was a 1913 collection of essays, Through the Torii. In 1913, he made his second trip to England to lecture at Magdalen College, Oxford

Magdalen College, Oxford

Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...

 at the invitation of poet laureate, Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges, OM, was a British poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930.-Personal and professional life:...

. He was hailed in the pages of Poetry magazine as a pioneering modernist, thanks to his early advocacy of free verse

Free verse

Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...

 and association with modernist writers like Yeats, Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...

, and John Gould Fletcher

John Gould Fletcher

John Gould Fletcher was an Imagist poet and author. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to a socially prominent family. After attending Phillips Academy, Andover Fletcher went on to Harvard University from 1903 to 1907, when he dropped out shortly after his father's death.Fletcher lived in...

. In 1919, he made a transcontinental lecture tour of America. By the early 1920s, however, his work had fallen once again into critical disfavor, and he subsequently devoted his English efforts to studies of Ukiyoe, while beginning a somewhat belated career as a Japanese language poet. All of his later books were published in Japan, for Noguchi encountered stiff resistance from American publishers in the 1930s, despite the support of a few sympathetic editors like Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...

.

Late Life

Noguchi's politics usually followed prevailing Japanese tendencies. In the 1920s, following the leftist turn of Taishō democracy

Taisho period

The , or Taishō era, is a period in the history of Japan dating from July 30, 1912 to December 25, 1926, coinciding with the reign of the Taishō Emperor. The health of the new emperor was weak, which prompted the shift in political power from the old oligarchic group of elder statesmen to the Diet...

, he published in leftist magazines like Kaizo, but the 1930s, he followed the country's turn to the right. Partly as a result of his friendship with leading Indian intellectuals like Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...

, Sarojini Naidu

Sarojini Naidu

Sarojini Naidu , also known by the sobriquet The Nightingale of India, was a child prodigy, Indian independence activist and poet...

, and Rash Behari Bose

Rash Behari Bose

Rashbehari Bose was a revolutionary leader against the British Raj in India and was one of the key organisers of the Ghadar conspiracy and later, the Indian National Army.-Early life:...

, Noguchi was sent to India in 1935 to help gain support for Japanese objectives in East Asia, but by the time of the infamous exchange of letters between Noguchi and Tagore in 1938, there seemed little hope of gaining international understanding for Japan's increasingly militant imperialism. During the Second World War, Noguchi supported the Japanese cause, advocating a no-holds-barred assault on the Western countries he had once admired. After the war, he succeeded in reconciling with his estranged son Isamu before dying of stomach cancer on July 13, 1947.

Critical evaluations

Critical evaluations of Noguchi, while varying drastically, have frequently stressed the enigmatic character of his work. Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons

Arthur William Symons , was a British poet, critic and magazine editor.-Life:Born in Milford Haven, Wales, of Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy...

 referred to him as a "scarcely to be apprehended personality." Arthur Ransome

Arthur Ransome

Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist, best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. These tell of school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. Many of the books involve sailing; other common subjects...

 called him "a poet whose poems are so separate that a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression." Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, on first reading The Pilgrimage in 1911 wrote that "His poems seem to be rather beautiful. I don't quite know what to think about them." Nishiwaki Junzaburo

Nishiwaki Junzaburo

was a contemporary Japanese poet and literary critic, active in Shōwa period Japan.-Early life:Nishiwaki was born in Ojiya in Niigata prefecture, where his father was a banker. He came to Tokyo intending to become a painter and studied under the famous Fujishima Takeji and Kuroda Seiki but had to...

 wrote, "Most of his earlier poems have always seemed to me so terrific, so bewildering, as to startle me out of reason or system."

Noguchi may be considered a cross-cultural

Cross-cultural

cross-cultural may refer to*cross-cultural studies, a comparative tendency in various fields of cultural analysis*cross-cultural communication, a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate...

, transnational

International

----International mostly means something that involves more than one country. The term international as a word means involvement of, interaction between or encompassing more than one nation, or generally beyond national boundaries...

, or cosmopolitan writer. His work may also be considered, albeit somewhat more problematically, within the national literatures of Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 and the United States (see Japanese literature

Japanese literature

Early works of Japanese literature were heavily influenced by cultural contact with China and Chinese literature, often written in Classical Chinese. Indian literature also had an influence through the diffusion of Buddhism in Japan...

, American literature

American literature

American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...

). Noguchi has recently gained attention in Asian American studies

Asian American Studies

Asian American Studies is an academic discipline which studies the experience of people of Asian ancestry in America. Closely related to other Ethnic Studies disciplines such as African American Studies, Latino/a Studies, and Native American Studies, Asian American Studies critically examines the...

 due to the increasing interest in transnationalism

Transnationalism

Transnationalism is a social movement and scholarly research agenda grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states....

.

Yone Noguchi is played by Nakamura Shido in the film Leonie

Leonie (film)

Leonie is a 2010 film directed by Hisako Matsui and starring Emily Mortimer and Shido Nakamura. The film is based on the life of Léonie Gilmour, the American lover and editorial assistant of Japanese writer Yone Noguchi and mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi and dancer Ailes Gilmour...

(2010).

Books in English by Yone Noguchi

• Seen & Unseen, or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail (1897, 1920)
• The Voice of the Valley (1897)
• The American Diary of a Japanese Girl
  The American Diary of a Japanese Girl
  The American Diary of a Japanese Girl is the first English novel published in the United States by a person of Japanese ancestry. Acquired for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Monthly Magazine by editor Ellery Sedgwick in 1901, it appeared in two excerpted installments in November and December of that...
  
  (1902, 1904, 1912, 2007 http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1876_reg.html)
• From the Eastern Sea (pamphlet) (1903)
• From the Eastern Sea (1903, 1903, 1905, 1910)
• The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor Maid (1905)
• Japan of Sword and Love (1905)
• The Summer Cloud (1906)
• Ten Kiogen in English (1907)
• The Pilgrimage (1909, 1912)
• Kamakura (1910)
• Lafcadio Hearn in Japan (1910, 1911)
• The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (1914)
• The Story of Yone Noguchi (1914, 1915)
• Through the Torii (1914, 1922)
• The Spirit of Japanese Art (1915)
• Japanese Hokkus (1920)
• Japan and America (1921)
• Hiroshige (1921)
• Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi (1921)
• Korin (1922)
• Utamaro (1924)
• Hokusai (1925)
• Harunobu (1927)
• Sharaku (1932)
• The Ukiyoye Primitives (1933)
• Hiroshige (1934)
• Hiroshige and Japanese Landscapes (1934)
• The Ganges Calls Me (1938)
• Harunobu (1940)
• Hiroshige (1940)
• Emperor Shomu and the Shosoin (1941).
• Collected English Letters, ed. Ikuko Atsumi (1975).
• Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi: An East-West Literary Assimilation, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani, 2 v. (1990–1992).
• Collected English Works of Yone Noguchi: Poems, Novels and Literary Essays, ed. Shunsuke Kamei, 6 v. (2007)http://www.aplink.co.jp/synapse/4-86166-036-X.html