Min Tanaka

Min Tanaka
Born	(1945-03-10) March 10, 1945 Tokyo, Japan
Occupation(s)	Dancer, actor
Years active	1966–present
Height	1.70 m (5 ft 7 in)

Min Tanaka (田中泯, Tanaka Min, born March 10, 1945) is a Japanese dancer and actor.

Biography

Tanaka was trained in ballet and modern dance, but in 1974, turned his back on these forms. He began his solo career with a series of nearly-naked primarily outdoor improvisational dances that took place throughout Japan, often dancing up to five times a day. For a time in the 1980s, he was associated with Hijikata Tatsumi and butoh, a loose genre of Japanese dance, but now has broken from that framework as well, and no longer uses that term to describe his dances.

From 1986 to 2010, Tanaka hosted dance workshops based in Body Weather, a movement ideology which "conceives of the body as a force of nature: omni-centered, anti-hierarchic, and acutely sensitive to external stimuli." In 1985, Tanaka and his colleagues founded Body Weather Farm, located four hours west of Tokyo, where he taught summer sessions lasting four to five weeks in Japanese and English. Much of the training workshop students received was centered on the labor of workaday tasks, primarily in agriculture. Tanaka taught that performing such tasks in their environments and with their accompanying physical stimulations functioned as a dance student's teacher itself, overturning the tradition of the environment taking on a subordinate role to the dance student's technique.　He received the Chevalier of l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1989 or 1990.

He continues to experiment with new ways to use the body, including drawing inspiration from farming. Starting in 2002, he began to appear in movies and on television. He won the award for best supporting actor at the 26th Japan Academy Film Prize for The Twilight Samurai.

Filmography

Films

Year	Title	Role	Director	Notes	Ref.
2002	The Twilight Samurai		Yoji Yamada
2004	The Hidden Blade		Yoji Yamada
2005	House of Himiko		Isshin Inudo
2006	Tekkon Kinkreet	Suzuki a.k.a. Rat (voice)	Michael Arias
2009	Map of the Sounds of Tokyo		Isabel Coixet	Spanish film
2011	Rebirth	Taki	Izuru Narushima
2012	Gaiji Keisatsu		Kentarō Horikirizono
2013	Return		Masato Harada
	The Eternal Zero		Takashi Yamazaki
	47 Ronin	Lord Asano	Carl Rinsch	American film
2014	Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno	Okina	Keishi Ōtomo
	Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends	Okina	Keishi Ōtomo
2017	Blade of the Immortal	Mugai-ryū	Takashi Miike
	Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura	Binbōgami	Takashi Yamazaki
2018	The Scythian Lamb	Katsumi Ōno	Daihachi Yoshida
	Vision	Minamoto	Naomi Kawase
	The Outsider	Akihiro	Martin Zandvliet	American film
	The House Where The Mermaid Sleeps		Yukihiko Tsutsumi
	Modest Heroes	Blind man (voice)	Akihiko Yamashita
	Ninomiya Kinjirō		Sho Igarashi
2019	The Great War of Archimedes	Tadamichi Hirayama	Takashi Yamazaki
	Svaha: The Sixth Finger	Nechung Tenpa	Jang Jae-hyun	South Korean film
	Children of the Sea	Jim (voice)	Ayumu Watanabe
2020	The Memory Eraser	Shin'ichi Sugawara	Yūichirō Hirakawa
2021	Hokusai	Old Hokusai	Hajime Hashimoto	Lead role
	Inochi no Teishaba		Izuru Narushima
	Touge: The Last Samurai	Kawai Daiemon	Takashi Koizumi

Television

Year	Title	Role	Network	Notes	Ref.
2010	Ryōmaden	Yoshida Tōyō	NHK	Taiga drama
2014	Gū-Gū Datte Neko de Aru		Wowow
2015	Mare		NHK	Asadora
	To Give a Dream		Wowow
2016	Kyoto Love Story		Amazon Prime
	Gū-Gū Datte Neko de Aru 2		Wowow
2017	A Life: A Love		TBS
2019	Nodoka no Niwa	Ikuo Sakaki	NHK
2021	The Supporting Actors 3	Himself	TV Tokyo

External links

• Official website
• Min Tanaka at IMDb