PBA Galleries

Introduction by Charles Warren Stoddard. 51 pp. Mounted frontispiece of Yosemite Valley by William Keith. (12mo) original tan boards, dust jacket. First Edition.

On the rear blanks is a five page essay, in manuscript, dated February, 1907 and signed by Charles Warren Stoddard on Noguchi and on his perceived effects of the assimilation of the Japanese in the American culture: "It has always seemed to me that Noguchi's danger lay in learning too much English. Like all the Japs he absorbs rapidly and to keep at it, is finally to loose ones identity. The Japanese are loosing the charm, the poetry and the pictoresqueness that were their birthright. By the bye they will be a race of lillipution monsters physically than monkeys - but capable of meeting the world on its own ground and battling with it skilfully with its own warfare." Stoddard continues giving information on their meeting, Noguchi's emigration to America, and his involvement in the literary community of the day. Yonejiro Noguchi was born in 1875 in Tsushima, near Nagoya, the fourth son of a merchant Dembei Noguchi and his wife Kuwa. He attended Keio University in Tokyo, where he was exposed to the works of Thomas Carlyle and Hebert Spencer and developed an interest in haiku and Zen. Yone arrived in San Francisco in November of 1893 joining a Japanese-American newspaper run by Japanese exiles associated with the ‘Freedom and Peoples Rights Movement’. After 2 years of journalism and understudy work at Stanford, Yone discovered his true avocation ‘Poetry’. In pursuit of this new passion he contacted Joaquin Miller, who invited him to live in a cabin at his estate in the Oakland Hills. Through Miller's mentorship Yone was embraced by the local bohemian aristocracy led by Gelett Burgess. In 1897 Gelett Burgess and Porter Garnett published his first book of Poetry ‘Seen and Unseen’. Later that same year, following a trip to Yosemite Valley, William Doxey published ‘Voice of the Valley’. After much success, Yone returned to Japan in 1904 where he taught, lectured and wrote until his death in 1947. He is considered to be the father of the English haiku movement. On the rear pastedown endpaper is the ownership signature of [Jahu] Dewitt Miller of Forest Glen, Maryland, noted bibliophile and lecturer. Miller's library was dispersed by Anderson Galleries in several auctions during the 1930s. Provenance: John Carpenter.