Noguchi was born in the town of Tsushima, near Nagoya. He attended Keio University but left before graduating to travel to San Francisco in 1893. There, Noguchi joined a newspaper run by Japanese exiles associated with the Freedom and People's Rights Movement and worked as a domestic servant. He spent some months studying at a preparatory school for Stanford and working as a journalist before determining, after a visit to the Oakland hillside home of Joaquin Miller, his true vocation of poet. Miller welcomed and encouraged Noguchi and introduced him to other San Francisco Bay area bohemians, including Gelett Burgess (who published Noguchi's first verses in his magazine, The Lark), Ina Coolbrith, Edwin Markham, Adeline Knapp, and Charles Warren Stoddard. Noguchi weathered a plagiarism scand