From 1986 to 2010, Tanaka hosted dance workshops based in Body Weather, a movement ideology which "conceives of the body as a force of nature: omni-centered, anti-hierarchic, and acutely sensitive to external stimuli." In 1985, Tanaka and his colleagues founded Body Weather Farm, located four hours west of Tokyo, where he taught summer sessions lasting four to five weeks in Japanese and English. Much of the training workshop students received was centered on the labor of workaday tasks, primarily in agriculture. Tanaka taught that performing such tasks in their environments and with their accompanying physical stimulations functioned as a dance student's Teacher itself, overturning the tradition of the environment taking on a subordinate role to the dance student's technique. He received the Chevalier of l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1989 or 1990.