Sumie Tanaka

Sumie Tanaka
Occupation	playwright, screenwriter, essayist
Language	Japanese
Nationality	Japanese
Notable works	Repast Home Sweet Home Record of Youth
Notable awards	Blue Ribbon Award 1951 Best Screenplay – screenwriter
Years active	1930-1984
Spouse	Chikao Tanaka

Sumie Tanaka (田中澄江; April 11, 1908—March 1, 2000) was a Japanese screenwriter and playwright born in Tokyo. She was most well known for her long collaboration with film director Mikio Naruse and for writing screenplays for Japan's first major female director Kinuyo Tanaka. Member of the Bungakuza theatre company, she was married to playwright and dramatist Chikao Tanaka. The screenplays she wrote for Repast (めし, Meshi; 1951), Home Sweet Home (我が家は楽し , Wa ga ya wa tanoshi; 1951), and Record of Youth (少年期 , Shonenki; 1951) won her the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Screenplay in 1951.

In 1934, before World War II, Sumie Tanaka married her fellow playwright and dramatist Chikao Tanaka with whom she wrote plays for the Bungakuza theatre company. After the war was over, Sumie Tanaka and her family were baptized into Catholicism, an event that continued to strongly influence her works from then on. It is after World War II that she began her work as a screenwriter.

Sumie Tanaka worked as a playwright and dramatist for the Bungakuza theatre company, a theatre that staged Shingeki. She wrote popular drama and enjoyed a higher reputation than that of her husband's, Chikao Tanaka who directed her first multi-act play, Spring, Autumn (Haru, aki, 1939). She got her start at the Kidō stage and participated in the playwright workshops run by Kunio Kishida and Kan Kikuchi. In her works, Sumie Tanaka often depicted the life of middle-class families based on her own experience of it. These one-act plays include: A Shimmering (Kagero, 1934), Akiko's Face (Akiko no kao, 1936), and The Bereaved Family (Izokutachi, 1937).

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