Henry Scott Stokes

Henry Scott Stokes was born in England in 1938. After earning undergraduate degree from Oxford University in 1961, he joined Financial Times, Inc. He became its first Tokyo branch representative in 1964. He became Tokyo Bureau Chief of The Times in 1967 and became Tokyo Bureau Chief of New York Times in 1978. He is known as the most intimate friend of Mishima Yukio among foreign reporters in Japan. Added to that he has worked extensively in the arts. For almost a decade after leaving The New York Times in 1984, he worked with New York artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude on a joint work of art for Japan and America titled “The Umbrellas”. During the l990s he worked for several years for Mary Moore, the daughter of British sculptor Henry Moore. Thereafter in the 2000s and 2010s he served as a writer, editor and lecturer on a range of interests.
Henry Stokes was raised in an atmosphere shaped by his Quaker mother’s pacifism and his father’s eclectic interests as an army officer in two world wars, a scholar of both Winchester College and New College Oxford and a lifelong businessman leading a shoe business. He is married to Akiko Sugiyama and they have one son Harry now entered into tv and radio work in Tokyo.