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Yoko Tani
Yoko Tani (谷洋子, Tani Yōko; 2 August 1928 – 19 April 1999) was a French-born Japanese actress and nightclub entertainer, who had a career in both Japanese and European cinema during the 1950s and 1960s.
Tani was born Yōko Itani (猪谷洋子) in Paris in 1928, to Japanese parents Zenichi Itani and Taeko Egi. Her father was an economist, and her mother a longtime associate of Oku Mumeo. Her maternal grandmother, Maseko, served as the model for a famous painting by Kiyokata Kaburagi. Her great-grandfather, Gakusui Egi, was a renowned Confucian scholar and a feudal lord of the Fukuyama Domain.
Tani's parents were both diplomats at the Japanese embassy, with Tani herself conceived en route during a shipboard passage from Japan to Europe in 1927 and subsequently born in Paris the following year, hence given the name Yōko (洋子), one reading of which can mean "ocean-child." Tani would later play a diplomat's daughter in Piccadilly Third Stop (1960). She has occasionally been described as 'Eurasian', 'half French', 'half Japanese' and even, in one source, 'Italian Japanese', all of which are incorrect.
According to Japanese sources, the family returned to Japan in 1930, when Yoko would still have been a toddler, and she did not return to France until 1950 when her schooling was completed. Given that there were severe restrictions on Japanese travelling outside Japan directly after World War II, this would have been an unusual event; however, it is known that Tani had attended an elite girls' school in Tokyo (Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School, currently Ochanomizu University Senior High School), then graduated from Tsuda University, and subsequently secured a Catholic scholarship to study aesthetics at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) under Étienne Souriau.
Once back in Paris, Tani found little interest in attending university (although by her own account she persevered for two years despite understanding hardly anything that was being said). Instead, she developed a more compelling attraction to the cabaret, the nightclub, and the variety music-hall, where, setting herself up as an exotic oriental beauty, she quickly established a reputation for her provocative "geisha" dances, which generally ended with her slipping out of her kimono. It was here she was spotted by Marcel Carné, who took her into his circle of director and actor-friends, including Roland Lesaffre, whom she was later to marry.
As a result, she began to get bit parts in films—starting as (perhaps predictably) a Japanese dancer, in Gréville's Le port du désir (1953–1954, released 1955)—and on the stage, with a role as Lotus Bleu in la Petite Maison de Thé (French adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon) at the Théâtre Montparnasse, 1954–1955 season.
Tani's involvement with cinema was, up to the mid-1950s, limited entirely to that of portraying stereotyped orientals in French films. With the end of the US occupation of Japan in 1952, however, postwar Japanese cinema itself burst upon the French scene, culminating in the years 1955 and 1956 when a total of six Japanese films, including Akira Kurosawa's Ikimono no Kiroku (I Live in Fear 生きものの記録), were entered at Cannes. It was at Cannes that Tani first made contact with Kurosawa , and the director Hisamatsu Seiji, contacts which led to a trip to Japan in 1956 by Tani and Lesaffre and their joint appearance in the Toho production Hadashi no seishun (裸足の青春 fr. La jeunesse aux pieds nus), a film about the difficult lives of Catholics in the remote islands off Kyushu, in southern Japan. Tani played the part of a 'fallen woman' who has returned to the islands from Tokyo (where she had run off to become a stripper), and Lesaffre that of the local bishop. It was originally intended that the film be directed by Kurosawa himself, but in the end, it fell to his Toho stable-mate Taniguchi Senkichi. Tani and Lesaffre's ambition was to bring the film back to France and release it in the French market, an aim which was, however, never achieved.
During the same trip, and also for Toho, Tani took a minor role in Hisamatsu's Joshū to tomo ni (女囚と共に), a variant on the "women in prison" theme, in which she played a westernised Japanese Catholic named Marie. This film was notable only in that it starred two veritable legends of the Japanese cinema: Hara Setsuko and Tanaka Kinuyo.
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Yoko Tani
Yoko Tani (谷洋子, Tani Yōko; 2 August 1928 – 19 April 1999) was a French-born Japanese actress and nightclub entertainer, who had a career in both Japanese and European cinema during the 1950s and 1960s.
Tani was born Yōko Itani (猪谷洋子) in Paris in 1928, to Japanese parents Zenichi Itani and Taeko Egi. Her father was an economist, and her mother a longtime associate of Oku Mumeo. Her maternal grandmother, Maseko, served as the model for a famous painting by Kiyokata Kaburagi. Her great-grandfather, Gakusui Egi, was a renowned Confucian scholar and a feudal lord of the Fukuyama Domain.
Tani's parents were both diplomats at the Japanese embassy, with Tani herself conceived en route during a shipboard passage from Japan to Europe in 1927 and subsequently born in Paris the following year, hence given the name Yōko (洋子), one reading of which can mean "ocean-child." Tani would later play a diplomat's daughter in Piccadilly Third Stop (1960). She has occasionally been described as 'Eurasian', 'half French', 'half Japanese' and even, in one source, 'Italian Japanese', all of which are incorrect.
According to Japanese sources, the family returned to Japan in 1930, when Yoko would still have been a toddler, and she did not return to France until 1950 when her schooling was completed. Given that there were severe restrictions on Japanese travelling outside Japan directly after World War II, this would have been an unusual event; however, it is known that Tani had attended an elite girls' school in Tokyo (Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School, currently Ochanomizu University Senior High School), then graduated from Tsuda University, and subsequently secured a Catholic scholarship to study aesthetics at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) under Étienne Souriau.
Once back in Paris, Tani found little interest in attending university (although by her own account she persevered for two years despite understanding hardly anything that was being said). Instead, she developed a more compelling attraction to the cabaret, the nightclub, and the variety music-hall, where, setting herself up as an exotic oriental beauty, she quickly established a reputation for her provocative "geisha" dances, which generally ended with her slipping out of her kimono. It was here she was spotted by Marcel Carné, who took her into his circle of director and actor-friends, including Roland Lesaffre, whom she was later to marry.
As a result, she began to get bit parts in films—starting as (perhaps predictably) a Japanese dancer, in Gréville's Le port du désir (1953–1954, released 1955)—and on the stage, with a role as Lotus Bleu in la Petite Maison de Thé (French adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon) at the Théâtre Montparnasse, 1954–1955 season.
Tani's involvement with cinema was, up to the mid-1950s, limited entirely to that of portraying stereotyped orientals in French films. With the end of the US occupation of Japan in 1952, however, postwar Japanese cinema itself burst upon the French scene, culminating in the years 1955 and 1956 when a total of six Japanese films, including Akira Kurosawa's Ikimono no Kiroku (I Live in Fear 生きものの記録), were entered at Cannes. It was at Cannes that Tani first made contact with Kurosawa , and the director Hisamatsu Seiji, contacts which led to a trip to Japan in 1956 by Tani and Lesaffre and their joint appearance in the Toho production Hadashi no seishun (裸足の青春 fr. La jeunesse aux pieds nus), a film about the difficult lives of Catholics in the remote islands off Kyushu, in southern Japan. Tani played the part of a 'fallen woman' who has returned to the islands from Tokyo (where she had run off to become a stripper), and Lesaffre that of the local bishop. It was originally intended that the film be directed by Kurosawa himself, but in the end, it fell to his Toho stable-mate Taniguchi Senkichi. Tani and Lesaffre's ambition was to bring the film back to France and release it in the French market, an aim which was, however, never achieved.
During the same trip, and also for Toho, Tani took a minor role in Hisamatsu's Joshū to tomo ni (女囚と共に), a variant on the "women in prison" theme, in which she played a westernised Japanese Catholic named Marie. This film was notable only in that it starred two veritable legends of the Japanese cinema: Hara Setsuko and Tanaka Kinuyo.