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Min Tanaka
Min Tanaka
	Tanaka in 2023
Born	March 10, 1945 (age 79); Tokyo, Japan
Occupation(s)	Dancer, actor
Years active	1966–present

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.^[2] He received the Chevalier of l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1989^[3]^[4] or 1990.^[1]

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.^[5]

Filmography

Films

Year	Title	Role	Notes	Ref.
2002	The Twilight Samurai			^[5]
2004	The Hidden Blade			^[6]
2005	House of Himiko			^[7]
2006	Tekkon Kinkreet	Suzuki a.k.a. Rat (voice)
2009	Map of the Sounds of Tokyo		Spanish film
2011	Rebirth	Taki
2012	Gaiji Keisatsu
2013	Return
	The Eternal Zero	Kageura
	47 Ronin	Lord Asano	American film
2014	Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno	Okina
2014	Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends	Okina
2017	Blade of the Immortal	Mugai-ryū
2017	Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura	Binbōgami
2018	The Scythian Lamb	Katsumi Ōno
	Vision	Minamoto
	The Outsider	Akihiro	American film
	The House Where The Mermaid Sleeps
	Modest Heroes	Blind man (voice)
	Ninomiya Kinjirō
2019	The Great War of Archimedes	Tadamichi Hirayama		^[8]
	Svaha: The Sixth Finger	Nechung Tenpa	South Korean film
	Children of the Sea	Jim (voice)
2020	The Memory Eraser	Shin'ichi Sugawara
2021	Hokusai	Old Hokusai	Lead role	^[9]
2021	A Morning of Farewell			^[10]
2022	The Unnameable Dance	Himself	Documentary	^[11]
	The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai	Kawai Daiemon		^[12]
	Yokaipedia	Jizuri (voice)		^[13]
	Amnesiac Love		Special appearance	^[14]
2023	Father of the Milky Way Railroad	Kisuke Miyazawa		^[15]
	Mom, Is That You?!			^[16]
	Perfect Days	Homeless man	Japanese-German film	^[17]
2024	Who Were We?			^[18]
2024	The Real You	Wakamatsu		^[19]
2025	National Treasure	Onogawa Mangiku		^[20]
TBA	Black Ox	Zen priest		^[21]

Television

Year	Title	Role	Notes	Ref.
2010	Ryōmaden	Yoshida Tōyō	Taiga drama	^[22]
2014–16	Gou Gou, The Cat		2 seasons	^[23]
2015	Mare		Asadora	^[24]
2015	To Give a Dream
2016	Kyoto Love Story	Sei-san
2017	A Life: A Love	Isshin Okita
2019	Nodoka no Niwa	Ikuo Sakaki
2021	The Supporting Actors 3	Himself
2022	The 13 Lords of the Shogun	Fujiwara no Hidehira	Taiga drama	^[25]
2022	Teen Regime	Shigeo Hosaka	Miniseries	^[26]
2024	House of the Owl	Ryutaro Ogami	Lead role	^[27]