Japan

Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904, but when he was two years old his American mother, writer Leonie Gilmour, took him to join his Japanese father, poet Yone Noguchi, in Tokyo. Although the relationship did not last his mother remained in Japan, and Isamu grew up in Tokyo, Chigasaki and Yokohama, before being sent back to America for schooling at age thirteen. Noguchi returned to Japan for seven months in 1931, when he worked in ceramics in Kyoto and first encountered the temple gardens that would greatly influence his future work. He next returned to Japan in 1950, and spent much of the following two years there. During this period he created his first gardens, designed memorial structures for Hiroshima, created his first Akari lamps, and made ceramic sculpture on the land of Kitaoji Rosanjin. In 1952 he married film star Yoshiko (Shirley) Yamaguchi, but the marriage was not long-lived. Noguchi's last major period of work in Japan began around 1969, when he established a studio in the village of Mure on the island of Shikoku with the help of stoneworker Masatoshi Izumi, and embarked on the granite and basalt sculptures that culminated his career. During his last two decades Noguchi spent about half of each year at his studio in Japan. Although Isamu Noguchi was an American citizen, in 1986 he received the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation and in 1988 he was awarded the Third Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government.

Essay on Noguchi's ceramic sculpture  | Essay on the history of Akari  | Shop for Akari  | Noguchi on Monument to the Dead Hiroshima  | Noguchi on Akari