Talk:Yoko Tani

General

Added date of birth, real name, expanded filmography, et al. More citations will be added as I have time... 猫に小判 09:58, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Have had no luck finding a (verifiably) public domain image.. would be grateful if anyone could put one up in Wikimedia Commons 猫に小判 16:09, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Apologies for the Japanese-language and French-language references. These were provided only where no equivalent English-language reference existed. 猫に小判 08:41, 14 February 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 猫に小判 (talk • contribs)

Aiko Itō

>>* 1958 (UK) : The Wind Cannot Read dir. Ralph Thomas - Aiko Suzuki (Sabby)

I am assuming (but did not put in the article, since it qualifies as "original research") that naming the character Aiko in the film was a tribute by the author Richard Mason to Aiko Itō (sometimes better known by the name of her second husband, Clarke). In Mason's book the character's name is given as Hanako, but in the screenplay he changed it to Aiko.

Despite being married to a British citizen (Denzil H. Clarke, who amongst other things had been press attaché at the British Embassy in Peking), Itō was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien until released in order to teach Japanese at SOAS. She was one of two Japanese wives of British men drafted in to teach; the other was Otome Nishide (married name Daniels).

It is well-known that Itō was the basis of the character in Mason's book, since Mason was one of her students. A classic headstrong ojōsama -- the only daughter of a wealthy merchant marine family from the Kyobashi area of Tokyo -- she divorced her first husband (the result of an arranged marriage) and, at the age of 23, ran off to China, leaving behind a young son. In Peking she met and married Clarke, and they remained there for six years until wartime conditions became too severe (she was on one occasion kidnapped by the Japanese secret police). They finally left China for England in early 1942. But her marriage to Clarke was not to survive the trauma of expatriation and imprisonment: they divorced not long after her release from internment, although she kept his name for the remainder of the war. She became lecturer of Japanese language at SOAS in November 1942, and subsequently, in July of 1943, was transferred to the BBC to do Japanese-language propaganda broadcasts, having been chosen partly because she had a standard Tokyo accent (unlike Nishide). After the war she changed her name back to Itō and eventually moved back to Japan, maintaining throughout this period an on-and-off relationship with the English artist Theyre Lee-Elliott. She died in 1975 at the age of 63.

Parenthetically, Nishide's story was somewhat similar to Itō's: she met and married Frank Daniels in Japan, where he was a clerk in the Admiralty stationed at the port of Otaru in Hokkaido. When war was declared, Frank Daniels was interned, but became part of a rare prisoner-of-war swap and was able to come back to Britain, taking his wife with him. He subsequently became head of the Japanese language programme at SOAS, and Nishide taught there as well. (For her pains, on arrival in Britain she too was interned on the Isle of Man until released for this purpose -- it must be a rare case when both husband and wife are interned as enemy aliens by opposite sides in a war in direct succession).

猫に小判 10:13, 12 August 2015 (UTC)