Her father's political leanings were very liberal (for instance, when her school visited the Imperial Palace he had her stay home) and this independent outlook remained with her throughout her life.

In the fledgling film industry as well women were only starting to be cast in female roles; in 1922, senior onnagata including the actor and director Teinosuke Kinugasa, transferred from Nikkatsu Mukojima Studio to Kokkatsu to protest the hiring of actresses by the company.

She began shooting highly motivated, but when violently scolded by Director Minoru Murata in front of the crowd at the location site, she ran off the set in embarrassment with co-star Ryoichi Takeguchi and disappeared; the newspapers wrote that she was in danger of committing suicide.

Their romantic escape made them idols of the public but Okada, fired from Nikkatsu and blackballed by the film industry, had to return to the stage as her sole livelihood.

In 1928 she launched the "Yoshiko Okada Theater Company" with the support of Sanjugo Naoki, a popular writer, and toured successfully throughout Japan and even China and Korea until April 1930 when the troupe disbanded.

Until the Day We Meet Again, with only musical interludes and sound effects but no dialogue, couldn't make the most of her stage skills but was still critically acclaimed, ranking 7th among Kinema Junpō's list for 1932.

Ironically her last great film role might have been in A Sword Comes on the Scene, the lost avant-garde masterpiece of Teinosuke Kinugasa, whose rebellion against women actresses led to Okada's first steps in cinema.

[2] With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Okada's films were censored as part of militarist restrictions on freedom of expression and Sugimoto, on probation due to his proletarian activism, was in fear of being sent to prison.

The consul general requested their return but, on January 13, Soviet officials informed him that, upon investigation, it was determined that both persons had entered the USSR voluntarily and by their own means.

[6] Also under torture, Sugimoto confessed that he, Seki Sano and Yoshi Hijikata, Japanese dramatists living in Moscow, and also soviet playwright and director Vsevolod Meyerhold were all spies.

Soviet authorities fabricated a fictional career for the five years before her release but her activities and duties in the NKVD prison in Moscow are not clear; she was rumored to have been on a top-secret mission.

After the war, she worked at Radio Moscow as an announcer for a Japanese-language broadcast married Shintaro Takiguchi, a Japanese colleague 11 years younger than her and a popular pre-war actor.

She also attended the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts, where she reappeared as a theater performer and was selected to co-direct the film Ten Thousand Boys with Boris Buneev, a work that has been called "the first Russian film about Japan not intended to be a depiction of the vicious Japanese enemy" When World War II started, Okada was almost completely forgotten in Japan but when in 1952 Tomi Takara, a Diet member on an official visit to the Soviet Union, confirmed that Yoshiko was alive, interest in her suddenly grew.

She re-entered the Japanese entertainment world, appearing on the stage, in several films including one of Yōji Yamada's Tora-san series, and on TV shows such as “Quiz Fun Seminar” and “Tetsuko's Room”.

In 1994 interviews concerning her imprisonment in the USSR were posthumously aired on the NHK as a documentary The World: My Heart's Journey: Soviet Confinement and published the December 1994 issue of "Chūō Kōron" magazine as "Yoshiko Okada's Lost Ten Years."