Noguchi sailed to Kobe on the SS Marei-Maru. On January 24, 1931, he wrote to Marion Greenwood that his ship was passing through Japan’s Inland Sea: “A perfect morning the water like glass—the innumerable islands look fantastic.”1 The boat stopped for a few hours at Moji on the southwest coast of Japan, where, Noguchi wrote to Ailes, the “girls are good to look at. A reporter took me for a long walk and showed me the sights.”2 Before traveling northeast to Tokyo on the Fuji Special Express, he briefly visited Kyoto and “fell promptly in love with the place.”3 “I was greeted by the people here as if I were somebody who belonged here.”4 When he stepped off the train at the Tokyo railroad station on January 28, a crowd of reporters was there to meet him. He discovered that the inquisitive reporter he had befriended on the boat from China had written a story about him for the major Tokyo newspaper, the Mainichi shinbun. The headline ran “Yearning for His Father the Poet.” The article quoted—or misquoted—Noguchi saying: “I remember my father’s face very well. I never forgot him for a moment and I always talked about him with my mother. I never got out of my head the idea of going to Japan, where my father was, and now I am finally realizing my hopes.”5 Another newspaper reported: “He has returned to Japan to visit his father whom he had not seen for 20 years. It is his intension to continue his study of sculpturing while staying with his father.”6 Noguchi disabused the reporters: “I have come to Japan not as the son of the poet Yone Noguchi. I have come as the American Isamu Noguchi to see Japan for my own sculpture … I want to see how Japanese culture has progressed, I want to look at the splendid sculpture of ancient Japan in Kyoto and Nara, and I want to work here under their inspiration … I will not meet my father.”7
Yone Noguchi learned about Isamu’s arrival from the newspaper. When reporters came to his house, he told them: “I really want to see my son. I want to do what I can for him. I did not know that he was coming to Japan … I do not deny that he is my son.”8 Early in February Noguchi and Yone met at the Marunouchi Hotel opposite the Tokyo railroad station where Noguchi was staying. Noguchi described the meeting (and subsequent meetings) as “trying.” He said he felt more pity and resentment than anger toward this man who could not look him in the eye. “It was his wife, as she was about to have a child, who had been difficult, he said—my being the eldest.”9 His stepmother Matsuko felt that her husband’s having sired a half-American child would bring shame on her family, which now consisted of five children, plus the one in her belly. Three of her children had died in infancy. No doubt Yone shared his wife’s misgivings, for, as the political mood in Japan turned more and more nationalistic, he had embraced nativist, right-wing views.
Noguchi soon moved from the Marunouchi Hotel to a new house in the Nihonbashi section of downtown Tokyo, an area that had recently been rebuilt after being destroyed by the horrific earthquake of 1923. The house was loaned to Noguchi by his father’s older brother, Totaro Takagi, who had been adopted into his wife’s wealthy family and who was now a widower. Most nights Takagi spent with his mistress, so Noguchi had the run of the house plus the luxury of a maid. His uncle Takagi replenished Noguchi’s dwindling finances and he “showered me with kindness, as did other relatives who gave me to understand that they favored my mother.”10
“My father would come to call on me, and we would hold long silent conversations. Then he would take me around to introduce me to various artists he thought I should meet, such as Takamura Kotaro and his father Koun.”11 Takamura was a Rodin-inspired sculptor and poet who had studied in New York, London, and Paris. After returning to Japan in 1909 he had written a manifesto in favor of modern art and artistic freedom. But in the late 1920s he, like Yone Noguchi, became stridently nationalistic and anti-Western. Noguchi wasn’t interested: “I wanted, on the contrary, the Orient.”
Noguchi became friends with Ikuma Arishima, head of the Nikkaten artists’ association, and Arishima included one of Noguchi’s Peking brush paintings and a recent sculpture of a crouching wrestler in the Eighteenth Nikkaten Art Association Exhibition. The French critic Élie Faure saw the show and, Noguchi recalled, admired Noguchi’s brush drawing of a reclining Chinese girl with her head resting on her elbow. Noguchi was “the one genuine eastern artist,” Faure said.12
While in Tokyo, Noguchi went to Karuizawa, a mountain resort in Nagano Prefecture, to see Inazo Nitobe, author of the well-known Bushido: The Soul of Japan. He and his American wife, Mary, were friends of his father’s and Noguchi had met them as a child. A prominent educator and diplomat, Nitobe had served as an undersecretary of the League of Nations and then as a member of the Japanese Imperial Parliament. When Noguchi visited him he was known for his distaste for Japan’s increasing militarism. Both Inazo Nitobe and his wife were Quakers and, Noguchi recalled, they addressed each other as “thee” and “thou.” Their adopted son, Yukio, the editor of The Japan Times, befriended Noguchi, and it was probably through Yukio that Noguchi managed to have a photograph of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House published on the front page of that newspaper.
On one visit to the Nitobes, Noguchi recalled, “[Charles] Lindbergh showed up in the woods in back. He had flown across the Aleutian Islands … he was very chased up by the press. So he came from the woods in back, with Mrs. Lindbergh.”13 Thanks to Noguchi, the Lindberghs escaped the newspaperman Upton Close, who was at the front door trying to get in. “And he was the man who was to announce the start of the war with Japan on the radio in 1941.” Through the Nitobes Noguchi met members of Tokyo’s elite and a year or so later, when Nitobe was in the United States, Noguchi sculpted his portrait.
Noguchi immersed himself in ancient Japanese art that he saw in museums and temples. He attended Noh theater and no doubt Kabuki, too. Years later he wrote that what he liked about Kabuki was the stylized gestures, the “rich cadence of the dialogue,” the grotesque makeup, and the masks. He also liked the hanamichi, the so-called flowery road, which is a ramp or bridge that runs from the back of the theater to the proscenium and that is used for the actors’ entrances and exits.14 “I used to think that coming to the Orient was walking backwards, to look backwards so you can see where you’re going. Then you know where you are going, or at least you have some notion of what you are looking for.”15
During his two months in Tokyo, Noguchi made two portraits in plaster. Tsuneko San is a portrait of the maid who served him at his uncle Takagi’s house. With her parted lips and soft cheeks, she looks youthful, gentle, and innocent. The other portrait was of his uncle Takagi—bald, wrinkled, and kindly with eyes downcast as if in meditation. For all Takagi’s calm, you feel the life of the mind pulsing within. The portrait brings to mind sculptured portraits of Zen priests of the Kamakura period as well as the Chinese portraits of priests upon which those Japanese likenesses were based. Noguchi recalled that he did his uncle’s portrait “by way of thanks.”16 A third sculpture from the Tokyo months was of the famous sumo wrestler Tamanishiki, whom Noguchi met and sketched when an acquaintance took him to a sumo wrestling stable. Noguchi said that he made this sculpture and the portraits of Tsuneko and Takagi in clay, then made plaster casts, and from those casts he made molds from which he made terra-cottas.17
In Noguchi’s recollection, he was restless and tormented by “conflicting emotions during his time in Tokyo.”18 Japan was also in a state of crisis. Looking back on this period, he recalled, “The preparations for war had already begun…”19 He told Dore Ashton: “The police were after you all the time, wanting to know where are you, who are you, what are you doing over here. All right, I was an American. I was visiting there. I was taking it all in. And all the ancient Japanese virtues and ancient Japanese art, songs and so forth, were pre-empted by the military.”20
When Noguchi told his father that he wanted to work with a forger of Tang figurines, Yone introduced him to Jiro Harada, head of the Tokyo Imperial Art Museum (now the Tokyo National Art Museum). Harada suggested that Noguchi might work with Jinmatsu Uno, a Kyoto potter famous for his reproductions of Chinese-style celadon ware. Indeed, Uno’s celadon reproductions were so authentic-looking that, as Noguchi recalled, in London they were sold as Chinese antiques to Japanese buyers who brought them back to Japan.21
Noguchi went to Kyoto to work with Uno, who welcomed him into his large family, served as a new mentor, and lent Noguchi a small zinc-roofed kiln worker’s cottage in Kyoto’s Higashiyama district. Noguchi described the four or five months he lived in Kyoto as a “period of great introspection and silence,” a period when, “seeking after identity with some primal matter,” he enjoyed a “close embrace of the earth.” Kyoto, he said, was a “dusty city of unpaved streets of indescribable charm. I felt a refuge from the vicissitudes of my emotional life at the time and thus I feel very grateful to it.”22
He told Dore Ashton: “I was all alone. I had a pottery I went to, I did things in ceramics. But I was also exposed to all these gardens and a way of life which was then very somnolent. Nobody ever went there. Everything was full of dust. But there I perceived an art which was beyond art objects. It’s the way of life, you might say…”23 Noguchi’s rediscovery of Buddhist gardens, to which his mother had introduced him as a child, prompted a new way of thinking about the sculptural enterprise. A sculpture did not have to be a self-defined object. It could also be a space or a garden and earth could be a material for art.
While in Kyoto Noguchi got to know the American scholar of Oriental art Langdon Warner, who, Noguchi recalled, was “on a shopping trip” for the Kansas City Museum.24 Warner took him to Nara to see Horyuji Temple, a magnificent and huge Buddhist complex with vast grounds and numerous subtemples. On the way to Nara they passed ancient grave mounds, which Noguchi later compared to mounds built by the Hopewell and Adena Indians in Ohio. The idea of raising the earth to make a marker or a monument would stay in his mind two years later when he designed the immense earth pyramid titled Monument to the Plow.
A few blocks from Noguchi’s cottage at 36 Senyuji Monzen cho was the Kyoto Museum, where he discovered haniwa, a form of sculpture that would influence him for the rest of his life. Starting in the third century, these mostly hollow and basically cylindrical unglazed ceramic figures, animals, and houses were placed around grave mounds. “Simpler, more primitive than Tang figurines, they were in a sense modern, they spoke to me and were closer to my feeling for earth.”25 Haniwa had the same pared-down purity as Brancusi’s sculpture. Until then, like Brancusi, Noguchi had spurned clay because it was associated with the tradition of Rodin. Haniwa made clay seem an appropriate material for modern sculpture.
The most impressive of Noguchi’s Kyoto sculptures, and the most haniwalike, was The Queen, now in the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is forty-five inches high and consists of five stacked cylindrical or rounded shapes. The lower two flared cylinders (one with a pair of arms attached) form the queen’s body. The third cylinder up is the head on top of which two rounded shapes form a headdress. The effect is both majestic and, thanks to the queen’s akimbo arms and huge headgear, funny. The Queen could be seen as an outsize chess piece. She also recalls Brancusi’s segmented columns; her rough wooden base was surely inspired by Brancusi as well.
The Queen, 1931. Terra-cotta, ht. 45½ in. (Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist. Photograph by John Tsantes)
Using Uno’s climbing kiln, Noguchi fired numerous terra-cotta sculptures and vases that amazed and baffled his host. When Julien Levy saw this group of Kyoto sculptures exhibited at the John Becker gallery in 1932, he wrote that Noguchi “executed some of his finest work to date, including a group of vase forms that were merely turned on the wheel but are so direct and at once subtle and monumental, that one sometimes wishes he would forego some of his more ambitious projects and give us more of these comparative ‘trifles.’”26
Noguchi’s June 1 letter to his mother said he would be back in New York early in September. “And then I have been feeling now that I want to stay put in one place for a long time—a sculptor you know can not travel and expect to do much work … as I said before I want to be where you and Ailes are—rather selfish on my part I guess.”27 On July 24 he wrote again: “Expect to leave Japan in about a month—before which time I will again be sending cases addressed to myself [care of] yourself 119 East 17th Street.” There would, he said, be three cases from China, about three from Japan, and two from Paris. He asked Leonie to look for a studio, which, he said, should be “very large—high ceiling and sunlight.”28 He wanted an extra room and he said he’d like to be on Fifty-seventh Street “on top of a skyscraper—at least.” The rent, he said, should be about $100 or $125 per month. For an impoverished artist, Noguchi had high standards.
Japanese troops invaded Manchuria on September 18, 1931. The “Manchurian Incident” was the first overt act of war by a country that had been gearing up for aggression for many years. Noguchi took “the last boat out,” he said. Before the invasion, he left from Yokohama on the Chichibu-maru. His feelings about Japan remained ambivalent. The xenophobia and militarism that he had witnessed were anathema to him, yet his passion for Japanese culture remained. After he returned to New York he wrote to his father: “I wish to tell you that I have no regrets about my trip to Japan. I believe it to have been all for the best. I feel grateful for whatever you were able to do for me there. I feel great attachment to Japan. I love it as much as I would some person for its faults as well as its virtues.” Japan was, he said, “the foundation of my earliest dreams.”29
His ship sailed to San Francisco by way of Hawaii. Upon his arrival in San Francisco on the evening of September 24, 1931, he wrote to Ailes to announce his “arrival in the land of the free.”30 He was “taking in this town; now it’s 3 am.” Relieved to be far away from militaristic Japan, he did not tell his sister about an unpleasant incident that delayed his disembarking in San Francisco. Years later he told an interviewer: “But when I got back to America, I had with me Bucky’s book called ‘4-D.’ It was mimeographed. So they wouldn’t let me into the country, they said it was Communist literature … So I was stuck on the boat, the Chi Chibu-maru, in San Francisco Bay … They said ‘no, no, no, you can’t come in. You’re a Communist’ … Would you believe it? This book was taken up entirely with correspondence between Bucky and Mr. Vanderbilt!”31 Noguchi finally contacted a lawyer who succeeded in getting him released from the boat and onto his homeland.