I came across Tanaka Min when I recently watched the Ruroni Kenshin るろうに剣心 movie trilogy on DVD. The sword choreography was absolutely amazing and should be watched for that alone. Otherwise I am not a big fan of the franchise for I find Kenshin a little too effete and the main female character unconvincing as a practitioner of budo. Although Tanaka Min only had a small supporting part in the second and third films, playing Kashiwazaki Nenji, the leader of the Oniwanban (ninjas for the old Shogunate who are sleeper agents embedded in society). His calm demeanor and wisdom, provided me with a template for what I would like to aspire to become as I age. "Gentle, run down at the seams" as described by Nobuhiro Watsuki, the creator of RK. But still possessed of a quick mind and able to guide his younger followers to choose the right path. Tanaka Min also played important supporting roles in the movies 47 Ronin, the Hidden Blade and Twilight Samurai. I hope through my efforts in this blog that he can be better known and appreciated by the global community.
A brief description of his background from Wikipedia.
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 around 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 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 Prize for The Twilight Samurai.
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