[1] He attended Keio University in Tokyo, where he was exposed to the works of Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer, and also expressed interests in haiku and Zen.

He lived for a time in the home of Shiga Shigetaka, editor of the magazine Nihonjin, but left before graduating to travel to San Francisco in November 1893.

He spent some months at Palo Alto, California studying at a preparatory school for Stanford University but returned to journalistic work in San Francisco during the Sino-Japanese War.

Noguchi weathered a plagiarism scandal in 1896 to publish two books of poetry in 1897, and remained an important fixture of the Bay Area literary scene until his departure to the East Coast in May 1900.

In September 1900 he made his long-awaited visit to Charles Warren Stoddard in Washington D.C. "After many years of passionate correspondence across long distances," writes historian Amy Sueyoshi, "they had finally consummated their affection for one another in person.

Noguchi then sailed to England, where (with the help of his artist friend Yoshio Markino) he published and promoted his third book of poetry, From the Eastern Sea, and formed connections with leading literary figures like William Michael Rossetti, Laurence Binyon, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Laurence Housman, Arthur Symons and the young Arthur Ransome.

His London success brought him some attention on his return to New York in 1903, and he formed productive new friendships with American writers like Edmund Clarence Stedman, Zona Gale, and even Mary MacLane, but he continued to have difficulty publishing in the United States.

He spent much of the summer of 1903 selling curios at Kushibiki and Arai's "Japan by Night" installation at Madison Square Garden, “doing a pretty good business, selling things between 7 and 12 dollars a night,” telling Stoddard it was “awfully jolly to do such a thing upon the roof full of fresh air and music.”[5] Noguchi's situation changed dramatically with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, as his writings on various aspects of Japanese culture were suddenly in great demand among magazine and newspaper editors.

Having (he thought) ended his brief, secret marriage to Léonie Gilmour in the early months of 1904, Noguchi made plans to return to Japan and marry Ethel Armes.

"[11] After studying Ernest Fenollosa's Noh translations with Ezra Pound, Yeats staged his first Noh-style play, At the Hawk's Well, in 1916, eliciting Noguchi's approval in another Japan Times column.

While in London, he met with George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Laurence Binyon, Arthur Symons, Sarojini Naidu, and numerous other noted literary figures, and also investigated the latest trends in British modern art, spending time with Roger Fry, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Joseph Pennell, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Moore thought the book "useful to the judge of prints"; not Rowland, who complained that its aesthetic judgments "tend toward the sentimental and are for the most part so superficial as to be of practically no value."

Partly as a result of his friendship with leading Indian intellectuals like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, Noguchi was sent to India in 1935–36 to help gain support for Japanese objectives in East Asia, but he had limited success.

Noguchi contributed to numerous periodicals in the United States, Japan, England, and India, including: The Academy, Asahi Shimbun, Blackwood's, The Bookman, The Bookman, The Boston Transcript, The Brooklyn Eagle, The Calcutta Review, The Chap-Book, Chūōkōron, The Conservator, The Dallas Morning News, The Detroit Free Press, The Dial, The Double-Dealer, The Egoist, The Graphic, The Japan Times, Kaizō, The Lark, Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, London Mercury, Los Angeles Times, Mainichi Shinbun, Mita Bungaku, The Modern Review, Myōjō, The Nation (London), The Nation (New York), The New Orleans Times-Democrat, The New York Globe, The New York Sun, The New York Times, The New-York Tribune, The Philistine, Poetry Magazine, Poet Lore, The Poetry Review, The Reader Magazine,San Francisco Chronicle, St. Paul Globe, Sunset Magazine, T'ien Hsia Monthly, T.P.