Age, Biography, and Wiki
Yoko Ono was born on February 18, 1933. She is an avant-garde artist, musician, filmmaker, and peace activist. Her marriage to John Lennon cemented her place in the cultural landscape, while her work continues to inspire new generations. Ono's biography is marked by her contributions to conceptual art and her role in shaping the narrative around The Beatles.
| Occupation | Performance Artist |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 18 February 1933 |
| Age | 92 Years |
| Birth Place | Tokyo City, Japan |
| Horoscope | Aquarius |
| Country | Japan |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Yoko Ono's physical measurements are not extensively documented, but her presence in the art world is anything but small. Her impact on activism and cultural movements outweighs traditional measurements of height and weight.
| Height | |
| Weight | |
| Body Measurements | |
| Eye Color | |
| Hair Color |
Dating & Relationship Status
Yoko Ono was married to John Lennon from 1969 until his death in 1980. Her relationship with Lennon was highly publicized and influential in both their careers and personal lives.
Isoko's adoptive maternal grandfather Zenjiro Yasuda (安田 善次郎) was an affiliate of the Yasuda clan and zaibatsu. Eisuke came from a long line of samurai warrior-scholars. The kanji translation of Yōko (洋子) means "ocean child". Two weeks before Ono's birth, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco, California, by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after, with Ono first meeting her father when she was two years old.
In 1937, the family was transferred back to Japan, and Ono enrolled at Tokyo's elite Gakushūin (also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan. Ono was enrolled in piano lessons from the age of 4, until the age of 12 or 13. She attended kabuki performances with her mother, who was trained in shamisen, koto, otsuzumi, kotsuzumi, nagauta, and could read Japanese musical scores.
Starvation was rampant in the destruction that followed the Tokyo bombings; the Ono family was forced to beg for food while pulling their belongings in a wheelbarrow. Ono said it was during this period in her life that she developed her "aggressive" attitude and understanding of "outsider" status. Other stories tell of her mother bringing a large number of goods to the countryside, where they were bartered for food. In one anecdote, her mother traded a German-made sewing machine for 60 kg of rice to feed the family. During this time, Ono's father, who had been in Hanoi, was believed to be in a prisoner of war camp in China. Ono told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on October 16, 2007, that "He was in French Indochina, which is Vietnam actually... in Saigon. He was in a concentration camp."
Ono joined her family in New York in September 1952, enrolling at nearby Sarah Lawrence College. Ono's parents approved of her college choice, but disapproved of her lifestyle and chastised her for befriending people they felt were beneath her. In 1956, Ono left college to elope with Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, a star in Tokyo's experimental community, then studying at Juilliard.
After living apart for several years, Ono and Ichiyanagi filed for divorce in 1962. Ono returned home to live with her parents, and, suffering from clinical depression, was briefly placed into a Japanese mental institution.
Ono and Cox divorced on February 2, 1969, and she married John Lennon later that same year. During a 1971 custody battle, Cox disappeared with their eight-year-old daughter. He won custody after successfully claiming that Ono was an unfit mother due to her drug use. Ono's ex-husband changed Kyoko's name to "Ruth Holman" and subsequently raised the girl in an organization known as the Church of the Living Word. Ono and Lennon searched for Kyoko for years, but to no avail. She would finally see Kyoko again in 1998.
In a 2002 interview, Ono said, "I was very attracted to him. It was a really strange situation." Ono started writing to Lennon, sending him her conceptual artworks, and soon the two began corresponding. In September 1967, Lennon sponsored Ono's solo Half-A-Wind Show, at Lisson Gallery in London. When Lennon's wife Cynthia asked for an explanation of why Ono was telephoning them at home, he told her that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit".
In early 1968, while the Beatles were making their visit to India, Lennon wrote the song "Julia" and included a reference to Ono: "Ocean child calls me", referring to the translation of Yoko's Japanese spelling. In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording a selection of avant-garde tape loops, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn". The recordings made by the two during this session ultimately became their first collaborative album, the musique concrete work Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. When Lennon's wife returned home, she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon, who simply said, "Oh, hi."
During the Amsterdam Bed-In press conference, Yoko also earned controversy in the Jewish community for saying during the press conference that, "If I was a Jewish girl in Hitler's day, I would approach him and become his girlfriend. After 10 days in bed, he would come to my way of thinking. This world needs communication. And making love is a great way of communicating."
After "The Ballad of John and Yoko", Lennon and Ono decided it would be better to form their own band to release their newer, more personally representative art work, rather than release the sound material as the Beatles. To this end they formed the Plastic Ono Band, a name based on their 1968 Fluxus conceptual art project of the same name. Plastic Ono Band was first conceived of by Ono in 1967 as an idea for an art exhibition in Berlin but The Plastic Ono Band was first physically realized in 1968 as a multi-media machine maquette by John Lennon, also called The Plastic Ono Band. In 1968, Lennon and Ono began a personal and artistic relationship in which they decided to credit their future endeavours as work of The Plastic Ono Band. Under that name Ono and Lennon collaborated on several art exhibitions, concerts, happenings and experimental noise music recording projects, including a sound and light installation in the Apple press office that consisted of four perspex columns, each representing a member of the Beatles, with one holding a tape recorder and amplifier, the second a closed-circuit TV and camera, the third a record player and amplifier, and the fourth a miniature light show and loud speaker. Soon after The Plastic Ono Band name was used in recording and releasing somewhat more standard rock-based albums.
| Parents | |
| Husband | |
| Sibling | |
| Children |
Net Worth and Salary
As of 2025, Yoko Ono's net worth is estimated to be approximately $700 million. This wealth stems from music royalties, art sales, real estate investments, book sales, and licensing agreements, particularly those related to the Lennon estate.
Lennon was also intrigued by Ono's Hammer a Nail where viewers were invited to hammer a nail into a wooden board painted white. Although the exhibition had not yet opened, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono feigned not knowing of the Beatles (even as she had gone to see Paul McCartney asking for a Beatle song score), but relented on the condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in."
Career, Business, and Investments
Yoko Ono's career spans various fields:
- Art and Music: She is a pioneer in conceptual art and experimental music. Her work includes performance art, visual art, books, and films.
- Lennon Estate: Ono controls the lucrative Lennon estate, which generates significant income from royalties on John Lennon's music catalog.
- Peace Activism: Ono has been a prominent figure in peace movements, using her art and influence to promote peace and love.
- Real Estate: She owns notable properties, including the Dakota apartment in New York City and a valuable estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Ono began a career in popular music in 1969, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon and producing a number of avant-garde music albums in the 1970s. She achieved commercial and critical success in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Lennon that was released three weeks before his murder, winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. To date, she has had twelve number one singles on the US Dance charts, and in 2016 was named the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time by Billboard magazine. Many musicians have paid tribute to Ono as an artist in her own right and as a muse and icon, including Elvis Costello who recorded his version of "Walking on Thin Ice" with The Attractions for the Every Man Has a Woman tribute album to Yoko Ono, the B-52's, Sonic Youth and Meredith Monk.
Social Network
Yoko Ono is not overly active on traditional social media platforms due to her recent step back from public life. However, her influence and legacy continue to be celebrated through various cultural and artistic channels.
At Sarah Lawrence, Ono studied poetry with Alastair Reid, English literature with Kathryn Mansell, and music composition with the Viennese-trained André Singer. Ono has said that her heroes at this time were the twelve-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. She said, "I was just fascinated with what they could do. I wrote some twelve-tone songs, then my music went into [an] area that my teacher felt was really a bit off track, and... he said, 'Well, look, there are people who are doing things like what you do, and they're called avant-garde. Singer introduced her to the work of Edgar Varèse, John Cage, and Henry Cowell. Ono left college and moved to New York in 1957, supporting herself through secretarial work and lessons in the traditional Japanese arts at the Japan Society.
On September 24 and 25, 1968, Lennon wrote and recorded "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", which contains sexual references to Ono. Ono became pregnant, but had a miscarriage of a male child on November 21, 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted. On December 12, 1968, Lennon and Ono participated in the BBC documentary about The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, along with several other high-profile musicians. Lennon performed his Beatles composition "Yer Blues" towards the end, with an improvised vocal performance by Ono rounding out the set. The film would not be released until 1996, due to the death of The Rolling Stones' founding member Brian Jones a few months after it was shot.
During the final two years of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono created and attended public protests against the Vietnam War. They collaborated on a series of avant-garde recordings, beginning in 1968 with Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, which notoriously featured an unretouched image of the two artists nude on the front cover. The same year, the couple contributed an experimental sound collage to The Beatles' self-titled "White Album" called "Revolution 9", with Ono contributing additional vocals to "Birthday", and one lead vocal line on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill", marking the only occasion in a Beatles recording in which a woman sings lead vocals.
Education
Yoko Ono was educated at the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in the United States. Her educational background laid the groundwork for her future in the arts.
Through her diverse career and lasting impact on culture, Yoko Ono remains an influential figure in contemporary society.
The family moved to New York City in 1940. The next year, Eisuke was transferred from New York City to Hanoi in French Indochina, and the family returned to Japan. Ono was enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family. She remained in Tokyo throughout World War II and the fire-bombing of March 9, 1945, during which she was sheltered with other family members in a special bunker in Tokyo's Azabu district, away from the heavy bombing. Ono later went to the Karuizawa mountain resort with members of her family.
After the war ended in 1945, Ono remained in Japan when her family moved to the United States and settled in Scarsdale, New York, an affluent town 25 mi north of midtown Manhattan. By April 1946, Gakushūin was reopened and Ono re-enrolled. The school, located near the Tokyo Imperial Palace, had not been damaged by the war, and Ono found herself a classmate of Prince Akihito, the future emperor of Japan. At 14 years old, she took up vocal training in lieder-singing.
Ono graduated from Gakushūin in 1951, and was accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin University as the first woman to enter the department. However, she left the school after two semesters.
Ono first met John Cage through his student Ichiyanagi Toshi, in Cage's experimental composition class at the New School for Social Research. She was introduced to more of Cage's unconventional neo-Dadaism first hand, and via his New York City protégés Allan Kaprow, Brecht, Mac Low, Al Hansen and the poet Dick Higgins.
After Cage finished teaching at the New School in the summer of 1960, Ono was determined to rent a place to present her works along with the work of other avant-garde artists in the city. She eventually found an inexpensive loft in downtown Manhattan at 112 Chambers Street and used the apartment as a studio and living space, also allowing composer La Monte Young to organize concerts in the loft. They both held a series of events there from December 1960 through June 1961; the events were attended by people such as Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim. Ono and Young both claimed to have been the primary curator of these events, with Ono claiming to have been eventually pushed into a subsidiary role by Young. Ono presented work only once during the series.
