Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Takahashi Hisachika attended Tama Art University. In 1961, at the age of twenty-one, he sold a large-scale sculpture to the city of Yokosuka which paid for his one-way voyage to Europe by cargo boat. Throughout his career, Takahashi worked with influential mentors at the forefront of international pop and conceptual art, including Lucio Fontana and Robert Rauschenberg, but ultimately chose the path of a professional artist's assistant.