During World War II, he joined the United States Merchant Marine and served aboard Liberty ships as a purser and medical officer.

[5] In 1947, Richie first visited Japan with the American occupation force, a job he saw as an opportunity to escape from Lima, Ohio.

[7] After returning to the United States, he enrolled at Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1949 and received a B.S.

[8] He spent much of the second half of the 20th century living and working alone in Tokyo, with the exception of a brief marriage to the American writer Mary Evans from 1961 to 1965.

[10] He was honored by his adopted home with a number of awards including being inducted as a member of the Order of the Rising Sun in 2005.

[4] Author Tom Wolfe described Richie as "the Lafcadio Hearn of our time, a subtle, stylish, and deceptively lucid medium between two cultures that confuse one another: the Japanese and the American.

Because Richie was a friend of Fumio Hayasaka, who composed music for the cinema, he first met Kurosawa on the set of Drunken Angel, the director's initial collaboration with Toshiro Mifune.

Richie wrote the English subtitles for Akira Kurosawa's films Throne of Blood (1957), Red Beard (1965), Kagemusha (1980) and Dreams (1990).

[14] In the 21st century, Richie provided audio commentaries for The Criterion Collection on DVDs of various classic Japanese films, notably those of Ozu (A Story of Floating Weeds and Early Summer), Mikio Naruse (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs), and Kurosawa (Drunken Angel, Rashomon, The Lower Depths, and The Bad Sleep Well), among others.