[1] He graduated middle school at 15, and was recruited as a houseboy by Yoichiro Hirase, a Kyoto dealer in poultry, seeds and aviculture products who had founded a side business trading in marine and land shells.
In 1904, Kuroda followed Hirase in adopting Christianity, and through his church met many of the American missionaries who were active at that time in Japanese education, including Marshall Gaines and John Thomas Gulick.
During the period 1899–1918, a large portion of the marine and terrestrial mollusks of Japan were described by researchers in the United States and Europe, based on material sent overseas by Hirase via Kuroda.
Chief among the specialists in Japanese mollusks at the time were Henry Augustus Pilsbry of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and William Healey Dall of the Smithsonian Institution, who between them described more than a thousand marine and terrestrial species from Japan.
Kuroda attended regular meetings of the Hanshin Shell Club and the Malacological Society of Japan into his late 90s, and died a few months short of his 101st birthday.
In 1971, Kuroda, Habe and Katsura Ōyama were selected to co-author a monograph of the Sea Shells of Sagami Bay, published by Maruzen in Tokyo under the auspices of the Imperial Household Biological Laboratory.
The Imperial collection, on which the 1971 work "The Seashells of Sagami Bay" was based, is housed in the Showa Memorial Institute of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tsukuba.