Childhood (1904-1918)

Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles on November 17, 1904. His mother, writer Leonie Gilmour, had traveled there from New York after Isamu's father, poet Yone Noguchi, had returned to Japan. When Isamu was two years old his mother took him to Tokyo to rejoin his father, but the relationship did not last. Leonie remained in Japan, supporting herself by teaching English, and here Isamu grew up until he was sent to America for schooling at age thirteen. In these years he had little contact with his father. In 1912 the mother and son moved to the seaside town of Chigasaki, where Isamu was briefly apprenticed to a traditional carpenter and attended Japanese schools. As he entered adolescence Isamu was sent to Saint Joseph's College in Yokohama. But Leonie's unhappiness with his education and concern about racial prejudice prompted her to send her son back to the United States, to a progressive school in Indiana, in 1918.

Chronology