Born 1912 in Iwate Prefecture, Yasutake Funakoshi graduated in 1939 from the Tokyo University of the Arts and participated in the founding of the Shinseisaku Kyokai art association. Funakoshi taught himself to work in marble. After the war, he converted to Catholicism and designed the monument of the Twenty-Six Martyrs in Nagasaki, which won him the Kotaro Takamura Prize. Funakoshi was also honored with the Teijiro Nakahara Prize and the Bungei Sensho Award. In 1987, he suffered a stroke which left him in a wheelchair, with only his left hand allowing him to continue to work. He passed away in 2002.

When he was still alive, Funakoshi once confined to me that there was one thing he would like to have included into his biography: that was a joint exhibition with Shunsuke Matsumoto (1912-1948) at Kawatoku Gallery (Morioka) in 1941. With Matsumoto, who was a fellow student of Funakoshi’s at Morioka Middle School, Funakoshi had forged a lasting friendship. Even today, there is an exhibition room jointly dedicated to Matsumoto and Funakoshi at the Iwate Prefectural Museum of Art which in itself is already worth the trip from Tokyo to Iwate. Katsura Funakoshi, his second son, also is a sculptor.