Born in Paris. He moved to Japan with his family at the age of three. He learned drawing and oil painting from Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keiichiro, colleagues of his father, who taught French; he also studied nihonga under Ikeda Terukata and Ikeda Shoen. From 1930 he travelled in the islands of the South Seas and painted the people there in watercolour. In 1931, on the advice of Fujikake Shizuya, he began making woodblock prints, and two years later set up his own Jacoulet print studio to produce them.