was a Japanese poet and lyricist of children's songs and traditional Min'yō folk music. He wrote some of the most beloved and familiar pieces for children and youth choirs, such as "Akai Kutsu (Red Shoes)". He, along with Hakushū Kitahara, and are considered to be the three great poets and children's songwriters in Japan.
Early life
Ujō Noguchi was born or 栄吉, in the former town of Isohara, Ibaraki, which is now incorporated into the central part of Kitaibaraki city.
He was the eldest son of , a cargo-shipping wholesaler, and . Eikichi was born into a prestigious family that claimed its descent from Kusunoki Masasue, the younger brother of Kusunoki Masashige.)
After completing his 4-year elementary and 4-year senior elementary schooling in his home town, the teenage Eikichi moved to the capital in 1897, where he attended Tōkyō Middle School. It was there he began composing haiku. He continued on to Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō, the precursor of Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō, where he was mentored by novelist Tsubouchi Shōyō. In 1901, he became captivated by the Shintaishi or "New form poetry" movement. He quit college after one year to concentrate on writing poetry.
Head of the household
His father's business failure and death in 1904 forced him to return to his hometown as head of the family.
The family had earlier arranged a marriage for Eikichi to the daughter of a wealthy financier from Tochigi Prefecture as a way to salvage the languishing family fortune. Eikichi's married in 1904, when both were 23. The marriage was a reluctant one, and was ultimately doomed.
Eikichi is said to have drowned himself in alcohol, even as he worked on poetry. He formed a salon for poets where they could critique each other's works. It was around this time that Eikichi adopted the pen name of Ujō. He was now able to avail himself of private funds to make his first publication, a collection of min'yō poems, titled out of Mito, but it failed to bring him either fame or fortune.
Hiro gave birth to their first child, Masao, in March 1906. In June that year, Ujō traveled to Sakhalin on what became a failed business venture. He had traveled to Ōdomari with a geisha, where she then ran off with most of his investment capital. He tried to make a profit by shipping a train-car load of apples to Tōkyō, but to his misfortune, the apples had rotted by the time they arrived.
Hiro came to Tōkyō to urge him to return home, but Noguchi declared that he would stay in Tōkyō and become a poet. In January 1907 he started a monthly periodical of folksongs, , without acclaim. He and fellow members and Rofū Miki founded Waseda shisha (Waseda poetic society), and were to meet on a twice monthly basis.
Noguchi soon found himself in Hokkaido, trying to earn a living as a newspaper correspondent. He started at , a small paper in Sapporo, working there from 1906 to 1909. Hiro and their son later came to live there with him.
When the newspaper was formed in the city of Otaru, Noguchi and Takuboku Ishikawa, who was four years his senior, were recruited by the newspaper, becoming colleagues for a brief period. They had first met while still in Sapporo, and in his journal (9/23/1907) Ishikawa described his first impression of Noguchi as being "gentle and polite, black-moustached, and from his very looks he was obviously of a introverted character". Takuboku in Kanashiki omoide adds that Noguchi was "very self-deprecating and would say -goansu instead of -masu," going on to say that the man was less than dashing, and had certain distinct quirks in his pronunciation. They became fast friends. Noguchi tried to organize an ouster of the newspaper's editor-in-chief, and was fired as a result.
Around this time (October, 1907), Noguchi's wife gave birth to a girl, Midori. The child lived for only eight days. It has been said that Noguchi wrote the lyrics to "Shabondama (Soap bubbles)" in 1922, when he wrote of a bubble blown out of a straw that burst and faded before uplifting itself into air; in remembrance of his own child that died without her chance in life.
Noguchi moved to , and worked for three other newspapers before moving to Hokkaido. before he left Hokkaido, he returned briefly to his hometown, eventually returning to Tōkyō. He worked at six papers during this time.
With the death of his mother in 1911, he again returned to his hometown to manage the family-owned timber forests and farms. He had not wholeheartedly abandoned literature, and loathed his livelihood.