Mitsuko Uchida was born in Atami, a seaside town near Tokyo, Japan. When she was 12 her father became the Japanese ambassador to Austria, so the family moved to Vienna. She studied at the Vienna Academy of Music. Her teachers were Richard Hauser, and later Wilhelm Kempff and Stefan Askenase. She gave her first recital when she was 14 in the Vienna Musikverein. After five years, her father went back to Japan, but she stayed in Vienna. 