[1] Born in Waimea, Hawaii, to Japanese immigrants, Fujita attended a boarding school in Honolulu, where he adopted the name Neil.
He worked for Ayer for three years and during his tenure was awarded an Art Directors Club gold medal for his Container Company of America ad.
Columbia hired him in 1954 to lead the design department, building on the work of Alex Steinweiss who established the practice of custom cover art.
Fujita used his own colorful abstract paintings for the covers of Brubeck's Time Out, Gigi Gryce's Modern Jazz Perspective, and Mingus Ah Um.
[1] Near the time of retirement in the late 1980s, he served on the Board of Designers of the Go For Broke Monument near the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.