Wife of Hamaguchi Yōzō after meeting in 1949, she spent the majority of her life living in France from 1954 and in San Francisco from 1981, returning to Japan in 1996. Her speciality was copper engraving. Minami graduated from Toyama Prefectural High School in Nishi Takaoka in 1928, then was married and had a child. In 1945, after the war, she moved to Tokyo and would study oil painting with Mori Yoshio, as well as learning about fairy tales, which she would illustrate. Minami studied copper plate etching and aquatint with Johnny Freed Randell in Paris from her arrival in France in 1954, and the Ministry of Education in France would purchase her work, "Landscape", in 1956. In 1957, the Museum of Modern Art, New York purchased her design "Shepherdess with a Shepherd" as their yearly Christmas care, and in 1958 UNICEF purchased "Tree of Life" for the same purpose. UNICEF again purchased "Children, Bouquets, and Dogs" in 1964 for their 1966 calendar. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Minami continued to work on illustrations, producing pen and ink drawings for a book of poetry by Tanikawa Shuntaro in 1970, and in 1968 and 1969 creating illustrations for two volumes in the Kodansha "Complete Works of World Literature" encyclopedia. Minami's work for several decades lined rooms in the Imperial Hotel. She became an honorary member of the Japan Print Association in 1984. Her fame was worldwide, and her work resides in museums throughout Japan, France and the United States, Germany and the UK.