Min Tanaka is a Japanese dancer and actor. Born in 1945 in Tokyo, he began performing solo dance pieces in the 1960s in a variety of spaces and places. In the 1970s he started dancing naked and developed his own movement philosophy which he called Body Weather; he later founded the Body Weather Laboratory which combined his interest in both dance and farming. In the 1980s he became associated with Hijikata Tatsumi, the founder of butoh. In the early 2000s Tanaka started acting in films and on TV. Films he has appeared in include The Twilight Samurai, 47 Ronin and The Outsider. Over the years Tanaka has worked with many other artists and writers, including musicians Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey, Milford Graves, Keiji Haino, Otomo Yoshihide and Ryuichi Sakamoto, writers Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and Kenji Nakagami, and visual artists Richard Serra, Karel Appel, Jean Kalman, Noriyuki Haraguchi and Fujiko Nakaya.