Yoshiko Okada was a Japanese film and stage actress who was most famous for her defection to the Soviet Union.
She made her film debut in 1923 at Nikkatsu in Eizo Tanaka's Dokuro no mai.
On 3 January 1938, Okada defected to the Soviet Union with her lover Ryokichi Sugimoto, seeking freedom from Japanese fascism and hoping to study theater with other Japanese in the USSR. Sugimoto, however, was arrested and executed as a spy and Okada spent the next ten years in a prison camp.
At the end of her confinement, Okada began to work for Radio Moscow and eventually got to study at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts (Russian University of Theatre Arts), worked in Mayakovsky Theater.She helped stage a play and was selected to co-direct the film Ten Thousand Boys with Boris Buneyev, a work that has been called "the first Russian film about Japan not intended to be a depiction of the 'vicious Japanese enemy'."
Later played in Japanese films and dramas.
She died at age 89 in Moscow and later was buried in Japan. Edit Biography