is a female Japanese TV presenter and actress. Although one of her parents is American, Helen does not speak native-level English. She is well known as the wife of the comedian and former politician

Kiyoshi Nishikawa is a Japanese comedian and actor and former politician. Comedy career Nishikawa trained to be a comedian under Kin Ishii, and became a student at Yoshimoto Shinkigeki (a comedy troupe run by Yoshimoto Kogyo) in 1964. In 1966, he formed a manzai ...

and has written two books.

Birth and youth

Helen Sugimoto was born in

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

on 6 October 1946 but has not revealed who her father was. After her marriage, she acknowledged that her first name was derived from Helen Keller, a person her father admired. In Japan single parent women generally have a lower social status, as did entertainers and as an American Japanese shortly after World War II, Helen suffered much bullying in her early age. Helen's made her stage debut as a dancer in Yoshimoto Kogyo in 1963. Her purity and eagerness was loved by audiences and she immediately became one of the leading actresses in Yoshimoto New Comedy with the stage name "''Helen Sugimoto''".

Kiyoshi Nishikawa

Helen, already a star, married a lowly actor in the Yoshimoto Kogyo theatre company called

who went on to become the most successful entertainer of the

manzai is a traditional style of comedy in Japanese culture comparable to double act comedy or stand-up comedy. usually involves two performers ()—a straight man () and a double act, funny man ()—trading jokes at great speed. Most of the jokes ...

and owarai styles (traditional Japanese stand-up comedy involving two performers) in the 1970s and 1980s. In his earlier days, Helen took care of him and his co-starring comedian, Yasushi Yokoyama. Helen's support of her husband brought the couple glittering success and assisted in Kiyoshi's rise within Japanese national politics as an independent member of the Upper House of Councillors in the

Japanese Diet The is the national legislature of Japan. It is composed of a lower house, called the House of Representatives (, ''Shūgiin''), and an upper house, the House of Councillors (, '' Sangiin''). Both houses are directly elected under a paralle ...

. A position held for 18 years. In 1999, Nishikawa ranked fourth in a list of the wealthiest representative with 175.68 million Yen annual income. In a recent poll, the couple were considered to be who the Japanese consider to be the second best

role model A role model is a person whose behaviour, example, or success is or can be emulated by others, especially by younger people. The term ''role model'' is credited to sociologist Robert K. Merton, who hypothesized that individuals compare themselves ...

s of an "international couple". Their lives were dramatised in a 2006 series made by the national Nihon Television company.ドラマコンプレックス
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Mother

Helen has two sons, Tadashi and Hiroshi and a daughter Kanoko.

TV presenter

Helen still acts or presents on Japanese TV programs mainly

oriented In mathematics, orientability is a property of some topological spaces such as real vector spaces, Euclidean spaces, surfaces, and more generally manifolds that allows a consistent definition of "clockwise" and "counterclockwise". A space is ...

for housewives or older women.

References

External links

Lecturer
1946 births Japanese women comedians Living people Japanese people of American descent {{owarai-stub