Seth Jacobowitz

Seth Jacobowitz is Interim Resident Director at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. He is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard Asia Center, 2015) and translator of Brazilian author Fernando Morais’ Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). He is currently working on his next book, Japanese Brazil: Immigrant Literature and Overseas Expansion, 1908-1945.

Updated October 2021

culture en ja es pt

Foujita Discovers the Americas: An Artist's Tour - Part 2

  • By Greg Robinson,  Seth Jacobowitz
  • 8 Jan 2021
Read Part 1 >> After his stays in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Cuba, Tsuguharu Foujita resumed his round-the-world tour. In November 1932, he arrived in Mexico City. As an international celebrity in the art world, he was already well-known to Mexican art lovers. As early as 1922, his work had been the subject of a feature article in the newspaper Excelsior, “Foujita, Un grande y extraño artista japones, muy apludido en Paris.” [Foujita, A great and strange Japanese artist, Greatly applauded in Paris]. Foujita originally intended to stay in Mexico City …

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culture en ja es pt

Foujita Discovers the Americas: An Artist's Tour - Part 1

  • By Greg Robinson,  Seth Jacobowitz
  • 7 Jan 2021
The name of Léonard Foujita (AKA Tsuguharu Foujita) has lost much of its luster today. However, in his heyday in Paris in the 1920s, Foujita was not only the most celebrated Japanese artist in the world, but (along with Hollywood star Sessué Hayakawa) arguably the most famous living person of Japanese ancestry. Born Tsuguharu Fujita in Japan in 1886, the son of a Japanese general, in 1913 he left Japan to seek his career as a painter in Paris (where he changed the spelling of his name to “Foujita” and most often went by his last name alone). Although his debut ex…

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