The Glamorous Flower of the Silver Screen: The History of Yukiji Asaoka - 1935 to 2018

The Glamorous Flower of the Silver Screen: The History of Yukiji Asaoka - 1935 to 2018

Born in 1935, Yukiji Asaoka, real name Yukiai Kato, grew up in a family of geisha, with a Japanese-style painter, Shinsui Ito, and a former geisha in Shinbashi as her mother. From an early age, she was trained in Japanese and Western-style dancing and singing, and her gorgeous appearance and taut voice were greatly utilized in her later acting career. After joining the Takarazuka Revue, she entered the film industry, but as the film industry began to decline in the 1950s and 1960s, she moved to television, where she starred in the 1960 drama "Hibi no Shoshin," which was a big hit among housewives. She became popular as a reflection of the anxieties of families and couples. In 1981, she played Nene in NHK's historical drama "Onna Taikoki," and her portrayal of a woman who supports her husband but also has a strong core made her a sympathetic figure to many.

While her contemporaries Inako Arima and Chikage Awashima showed purity and grace in films, and Sayuri Yoshinaga reigned as a national purist, Asaoka's main fields of work were television and stage, and she distinguished herself by expressing the charm of an adult woman. In her later years, she showed her frankness in disclosing her dementia, and died suddenly of lung adenocarcinoma in 2018. Her journey as an inheritor of prewar artistic culture and survivor of the postwar transition from movies to television is a chapter in the history of entertainment in the Showa and Heisei eras, and she is still remembered as one of the actresses that the Showa era fell in love with.