After World War II, there came a point when Japan—exhausted by decades of nationalism and long-cloistered by its leaders for fear of cultural dilution—felt a powerful hunger for outside ideas. The artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi, the son of a Japanese father and white American mother, was uniquely positioned to introduce ideas that were familiar enough to be accessible, but exotic enough to feel progressive. Growing up in Japan, he was considered American; once he moved back to the United States to attend boarding school and then university, he was seen as Japanese (despite taking a white American name—Sam Gilmour—for a time). These symmetrical experiences of being “othered” in two places he could call home no doubt contributed to a clear sense of empathy, and a...