At birth, she suffered from oxygen deprivation, leading to her becoming a frail child with whooping cough who often missed school.
As a second grader still in elementary school, she was subjected to child sexual abuse at the hands of an employee from the family business.
After a young Vietnamese man living in the neighborhood came to pick up a donation, she decided to participate in a relief activity for orphans stricken by the Vietnam War, which led to the formation of a civic group called "Anti-war Akanbe".
[3] She also participated in the Latin Quarter struggle, related to the Zenkyōtō student protests and other civic movements of the time.
[4] At that time Tanaka was first impressed by Wilhelm Reich's Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf,[5] leading her to state:If you have a negative view of sex, you will become a person who appreciates authority, is afraid of their own desires, and has no spontaneity.
The world will end up with people who are easy to manage.During the early 1970s, Tanaka was a leading activist for feminism in her native Japan, where the women's liberation movement was called uuman ribu.
[6] They forwarded a comprehensive critique of the political, economic, social and cultural systems of modern Japan due to their patriarchal and capitalist nature.
[12] Tanaka's first well-known publication was a pamphlet distributed at a rally in 1970, titled Liberation from Eros (Erosu Kaihō Sengen).
[14] Tanaka published her best-selling autobiography, Inochi no Onna-tachie: Torimidashi uman ribu ron (For My Spiritual Sisters: A Disorderly Theory of Women's Liberation) in 1972, an account of her personal experiences with misogynist exploitation, including rape and discrimination in employment.
[15] This book also includes her critique of the Japanese New Left for its masculinist politics and she reflects on the violence of the United Red Army internal purge.