Judy Ongg

Biography

In December 1979, on Kōhaku Uta Gassen, NHK's New Year's Eve music show, Judy Ongg appeared in a dress with fan-shaped sleeves that she had designed herself. The dress was meant to work as a screen: a film of views of the Aegean Sea was to be projected onto the sleeves and bodice. The video was not ready in time for the performance, so the idea went unrealised, but the dress was remembered. She still sings “Miserarete” (“Enchanted”) in it.

She was born on 24 January 1950 in Taipei, into the family of Ong Bing-yong, a Taiwanese radio journalist; her birth name was Chien-yu. In 1952, when she was two, the family moved to Japan because of her father's work. She finished primary school in Tokyo, at a Chinese school, and studied English with a tutor, who gave her the name Judy. At home they spoke Taiwanese: her parents wanted the children not to forget their native language. At nine, in 1959, she joined the children's theatre company Himawari. Her father objected and agreed only on condition that she did not give up her studies. After the Chinese school she graduated from the American School in Japan (1969), and later from Sophia University in Tokyo.

Her film debut came in 1961 in the Japanese-American production “The Big Wave”, based on the novel by Pearl Buck. Television series followed, and in 1966 her first record came out on Columbia: “Hoshi to koishitai”. In the same year she voiced Françoise Arnoul, the heroine of the animated film “Cyborg 009” and its sequel. Real success came in 1967 with the song “Tasogare no Akai Tsuki” (“Red Moon at Dusk”). Her early songs were written by Shosuke Ichikawa, and many of them are enka, sentimental Japanese ballads; later came pop songs by Kyohei Tsutsumi and Shunichi Tokura. In the 1970s she appeared often in period dramas on television, among them “Edo o Kiru”, and in 1972, after Japan and China normalised relations, she became a Japanese citizen.

At the same time she was working in Taiwan. In 1966 she signed a contract with the Central Motion Picture Corporation, in 1968 she appeared in the film “Little Cuicui”, and in 1972 she won the Golden Horse award for best actress for “The Real and the Fake Heiress”. In 1973 the film “Ai de tiandi” brought her a special acting prize at the 19th Asia Film Festival. She also released records in Chinese. By 1978, when her last Taiwanese film, “The New Romance of the Western Chamber”, came out, she had returned mainly to the Japanese stage.

In 1973 she moved to CBS Sony. In 1975 the song “Ai wa Seimei” became a hit as the theme of a television drama. In 1979 “Miserarete”, a commercial jingle for the lingerie maker Wacoal, won the Japan Record Award at its 21st ceremony. That year she was also invited to Kōhaku for the first time. In the same year she was offered the role of Mariko in the American miniseries “Shogun” but declined: the dates clashed with the release of the song. The part went to Yoko Shimada.

In 1980 Judy Ongg received the Haiguang award in Taiwan, the second person to do so after the baseball player Sadaharu Oh.

In 1985 she recorded “Xin”, in Cantonese, for the Hong Kong version of the drama “Oshin”, and it became a hit across Southeast Asia. In 1990 she gave a show in Las Vegas, and the governor of Nevada declared 3 February Judy Ongg Day. The song “Ai de fengxian”, from a Chinese television programme, was released on the mainland the same year. In 1995 the Beijing Peace Concert took place in Beijing on her initiative. In November 1999 she organised the “Heart Aid” charity concert in Tokyo to help the survivors of the earthquake in Taiwan, and in 2008 a concert for Sichuan together with Jackie Chan.

In 1975 she began to study woodblock printing with Takatomo Kikuchi and Katsue Inoue, pupils of Shikō Munakata. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1993. Since then she has shown her prints in Japan, Taiwan, Germany and France, and her works have been accepted at the Nitten and Hakujitsukai exhibitions; in 1995 she joined the latter association as a full member. Many of her prints are devoted to Japanese houses. A view of the Byōdō-in temple in Uji, “Hō-ō Geishō” (size 100), was accepted at the 35th Nitten in 2003 and in 2005 was presented to the temple. She has written five books, among them a collection of conversations (1979) and the print album “Banshi Senkō” (1997). In 2022 she received an award from the Agency for Cultural Affairs.