Kiyoko Tanaka (田中 希代子; February 5, 1932 [Shōwa 7] – February 26, 1996 [Heisei 8]) was a Japanese pianist and teacher. She was the first Japanese musician to take a leading prize at a major international competition, sharing second prize with Ingrid Haebler at the Geneva International Music Competition in 1952. She went on to become the first Japanese prizewinner at both the Long-Thibaud Competition in 1953 and the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1955. Based successively in Paris and Vienna, Tanaka toured Europe, Japan and South America through the 1950s and 1960s. Her career was cut short in her late thirties by the onset of a connective tissue disease, forcing her to withdraw from public performances. Tanaka made her final orchestral appearance in 1968 and her last recital in 1970, at the age of 38. Afterwards, she taught piano in Tokyo by means of a wheelchair. She left very few commercial studio recordings, and her posthumous reputation rests largely on concert and broadcast tapes reissued from the late 1980s onward.
Source: “Kiyoko Tanaka”, English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), excerpt