Yōko Yamamoto

Yoko Yamamoto was recognized early — the Elan d'or Newcomer Award in 1966, when she was in her mid-twenties — and then simply kept working for the rest of her life. That second part is the harder achievement. Plenty of performers arrive; very few stay recognizable to audiences across six decades of changing television. She was born in Nakano, Tokyo in 1942 and died in February 2024 at 81. The detail I keep returning to is the Kikuta Kazuo Drama Award, which sits on her record alongside the screen work. It tells you she was not only a familiar television face but someone the theater world took seriously, and those two reputations rarely belong to the same person in Japan. She also worked in voice acting. I did not know her work as a contemporary viewer, so I will not pretend to a personal memory of her. What the record shows is a career of remarkable steadiness, and steadiness is the thing that actually earns a place in a country's cultural memory.

Name (English)

Yōko Yamamoto

Name (Japanese)

山本陽子

Reading

やまもと ようこ

Born

March 17, 1942 – February 20, 2024

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Pisces / Horse

Origin

Nakano, Tokyo, Japan

Height

155 cm

Occupation

actor / seiyū

Awards & achievements

• 1966 Elan d'or Award for Newcomer of the Year
• Kikuta Kazuo engeki shō

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko%20Yamamoto
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E6%9C%AC%E9%99%BD%E5%AD%90
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11469398

Tags

• Tokyo
• actor
• seiyū

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.