Yoko Ono's Real Name: Yoko Ono (小野洋子)

Quick answer: Yoko Ono's real name is simply Yoko Ono, written 小野洋子 (Ono Yōko) in Japanese, She was born on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo. She is a conceptual and performance artist, an experimental musician, and the widow of Beatle John Lennon (Britannica; Library of Congress).

Real name and early life

The Library of Congress name authority files her as "Ono, Yōko," with the macron that marks the long "o" in romanized Japanese. It also records her name in Japanese script as 小野洋子 and in katakana as オノ・ヨーコ. One LOC note describes her as a "Japanese-American conceptual artist, born 1933; born: Tokyo; active: New York City." Another source cited by LOC gives Kamakura as her birthplace, but Britannica and LOC's main entry say Tokyo.

Britannica says Ono was born into a wealthy family and grew up mostly in Tokyo, where she attended an exclusive school. As a child she wrote poetry and plays and trained in classical piano and voice. In 1952 she became the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushūin University. After about a year she joined her family near New York City, where her father, a bank executive, had been transferred. She studied writing and music at Sarah Lawrence College for three years but did not graduate.

Career highlights

In 1956 Ono married composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, and through him she entered New York's avant-garde art world. Her downtown Manhattan loft hosted a series of performance events she organized with composer La Monte Young. She collected her instruction pieces in the book Grapefruit (1964). In Cut Piece (1964), audience members cut away parts of her dress; Britannica says it was later recognized as a landmark of feminist art.

She met Lennon in 1966 at an exhibition of her work in London. They married in 1969 and staged their "bed-ins" for peace that year in Amsterdam and Montreal. When the Beatles split in 1970, she was widely blamed, but Britannica notes she went on to release Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970), Fly (1971), and Approximately Infinite Universe (1973). Their son, Sean, was born in 1975. Double Fantasy (1980) won the Grammy for album of the year, weeks after Lennon was shot to death outside their home, the Dakota, on December 8, 1980.

Her later work includes the dance-club hit "Walking on Thin Ice" (1981) and retrospectives at the Whitney Museum and, in 2015, the Museum of Modern Art. She won a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In 2017 the National Music Publishers' Association moved to add her as a songwriter on "Imagine."

Name notes for searchers

In Japan, family names come first, so 小野洋子 reads Ono Yōko. In English she uses the Western order, Yoko Ono. Ono is her family surname; she did not change it when she married Lennon.