Born October 20, 1948, in the Hakata ward of Fukuoka, Naomi Tani moved to Tokyo at the age of 18. After arrival in Tokyo, she was featured in a photo layout in Weekly Taishu / Popular Weekly (週刊大衆 - Shukan Taishu). This appearance led to offers for roles in "Pink films", the low-budget, independent soft-core pornographic films which dominated Japan's domestic cinema at this time. Her debut was in the 1967 film Special. She took her screen name "Tani" from the novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and "Naomi" from the central character in his important early work A Fool's Love. "Tani," or "valley," is also a Japanese slang word for the cleavage between the breasts. Consequently, Ms. Tani may have had a variety of puns in mind when she later opened a restaurant calling it the "Ohtani" (Big Breasts or Big Tani).Tani's early films were principally with the small companies that were making pink films independent of the large studio system in the 1960s. In her pre-Nikkatsu career, she appeared in comedies, dramas, and action films, but it was the S&M genre which would make Tani a star. Her debut film was Special (スペシャル - Supesharu) for Shin Nihon Eigasha and directed by the prolific pink film auteur Kōji Seki. The film had Tani in the role of the mistress of a black marketeer who tries to cheat people at an onsen. The couple is stopped by the local villagers. Experiments on the Human Body (Zanki: Seitaijikken 1967) was a war drama in which Tani played a nurse in China where Japanese doctors are performing experiments on Chinese POWs.
Tani had a minor role in director Mamoru Watanabe's Slave Widow, which starred major "pink" actresses Noriko Tatsumi and Mari lwai. Impressed with Tani, Watanabe, considered one of the "Pillars of Pink," cast Tani in her first leading role for his next film, Bed of Violent Desires (1967). Typical of the sex-thriller pink films made by Koei studio in the years before Nikkatsu took over the genre in the 1970s, in this film, Tani plays the role of a daughter who seeks bloody revenge against her mother and her lover after they kill Tani's father for his money. Tani's first experience with an S&M film was in one episode of the omnibus film Memoirs Of A Modern Female Doctor (1967), and her first full-fledged S&M leading role was in director Masanao Sakao's Cruel Map of Women's Bodies (1967), in which she plays a prostitute who repeatedly escapes from, and then captured and tortured by the yakuza. Tani would play similar roles for Sakao in other films such as Virgins With Bad Reputations, also made in 1967.
During this early stage of her career, Tani sometimes worked at prominent pink film producer/director Kōji Wakamatsu's independent studio. She worked several times with the prolific director Shinya Yamamoto in such films as Degenerate (1967), Memoirs of Modern Love: Curious Age (1967) and Season For Rapists (1969). Also during this period she became friends with the SM author, Oniroku Dan, with whom she would work throughout her film career. Dan was secretly writing S&M film scripts under the pseudonym Matsugoro Kuroiwa while working as a high school English teacher. Tani's "pretty face, beautiful fair skin... and 96cm (38") large breasts" as well as her acting abilities helped make her a popular actress in the late 1960s. She reportedly appeared in more than 200 films before her work with Nikkatsu, for which she is best known today. Even at this early stage of her career, working for independent studios, Tani had already established herself as the "Queen of Pink." As an indication of her growing prominence as a representative of the erotic cinema in Japan, she appeared in the U.S. Playboy's December 1968 issue in their "Girls of the Orient" pictorial article. In 1972, she directed two films from Oniroku Dan stories, Sex Killer and Starved Sex Beast. Commenting on her own directorial style, Tani noted, "I accentuated scenes with a lot of torture and bondage."
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