Born in Tokyo, the eldest son of the sculptor Koun Takamura. In 1897 he entered the sculpture course of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts; after graduating he moved in 1905 to the Western painting course. From 1906 he studied in Europe and America, and on returning began to work in both art and poetry. In 1912 he built a studio at Komagome and showed oil paintings at the first Fyuzan-kai exhibition, which he formed with Ryusei Kishida and others. In sculpture he pursued keenly the conflict between the modern European thinking about form that he had learned from Rodin and traditional Japanese method, and brought to fruition a full theory of sculpture with plane, mass, movement and modelling as its four factors, as seen in his book “Zokei Biron”, opening the history of modern Japanese sculpture. His writings include the poetry collections “Michi no Michi”, “Chieko-sho” and “Tenkei”.