Kiyohara Tama

(1861 – 1939), also known as or O'Tama Chiovara, , or was a Japanese painter who spent most of her life in the Sicilian city of Palermo. Her maiden name was .

Biography Kiyohara Tayo was the second daughter of Kiyohara Einosuke, intendant of Zōjō-ji temple in Shiba, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Her life suddenly changed when Sicilian sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa, for whom she had modeled when she was just 17, after spending six years in Japan as a sculpture professor, decided to go home in 1882 taking with him Kiyohara Einosuke, Kiyohara's wife and 21-year-old Tayo. The school still exists as Istituto Statale d'Arte di Palermo.

After her husband's death in 1927, two Japanese newspapers, the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun and the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, found out about her story and published a serialized novel about it, bringing Tama to fame in her homeland. By then she could barely speak Japanese anymore, but she decided to go back. After her return, she opened an atelier in Shiba Shinbori, where she died some years later. She is buried at her family temple, Chōgen-ji. Kiyohara was a painter of great skill, but most of the works she left in Japan were destroyed during World War II, while those left in Italy are still exhibited in various private collections.

According to her wishes, half of her ashes are in Japan, and half lie in Palermo next to her husband's grave.

In popular culture Tama features in the 2018 novel The Death of Noah Glass by Australian author Gail Jones, in which the eponymous character is accused of being involved in the theft and smuggling of a sculpture of Eleonora by Vincenzo Ragusa.