Tomoko Yamamoto was born in 1943 in Tokyo, Japan, but her home town, called Musashino-shi, is outside of the 23 districts of Tokyo. Her early exposure to nature and photography was nurtured by her father, an avid amateur photographer, hiker, and skiier, who took her and her younger sister on gradually more difficult hikes while she took her first piano lesson at age 7.
After college in Tokyo, Japan, Tomoko Yamamoto went to the United States as a student in 1966 and finished her Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1973. She moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1982 after 16 years of studying and working in various places in Illinois, Michigan, New York State, and Pennsylvania. Between 1973 and 1988 she worked in biophysical research, physics teaching, and technical translation, Outside of her professional work, she has sung in church choirs as a volunteer for many years, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ithaca, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland, but she first took her voice lessons in 1988.

Between 1989 and 2009 Tomoko Yamamoto exhibited her photographs in various galleries in the Mid-Atlantic region (Baltimore, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia). and in Ithaca, New York, and in New York City. Those were solo and group shows.

She studied voice with Lynn Taylor Hebden (at the Peabody Conservatory of Music) and Serafina DiGiacomo (Goucher College) and composition with Pamela Layman Quist (privately). She first went to Europe in 1992 with the Chancel Choir of the Second Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. The choir toured in Leipzig, Munich, Salzburg, Melk, and Stupava, Slovakia where they sang. This trip exposed her to Europe for the first time. The choir toured two more times in Europe, in England (1994) and in Scotland (1998) in which she also participated. These additional tours exposed her to English cathedral music and composers. In 1993 she went back to Germany on her own to visit places where Bach lived and traveled. Because of her love of Schubert's songs, in 1994 she went back to Austria on her own to take photos in Austira.

In 2003 she was able to combine her photographs of Bach-related places, such as Eisenach, Hamburg, and Leipzig and her singing for the first time in a program called "Bach and His World" She also presented a short program of her own Japanese song compositions also with her photography. She sang a set of four songs called ""Shiki no Uta" and two songs in a new series, Manyo no Uta. In 2004 she developed another Bach program, titled "Bach in Weissenfels," which focuses on Bach's hunt cantata (BWV208).

Between 2006 and 2008 she studied with Robin Kissinger as her vocal coach and in 2007 she presented her mostly Schubert program called "Water Songs and Water Landscapes" in which she sang the water songs and showed slideshows of water landscapes prior to each song. Since 2009 in Vienna, Austria, she has been working on her singing with Gisela Theisen (voice), Marcin Koziel and Mami Teraoka (Korrepetition).

She also volunteered as a program director for the Japanese/American Fellowship Society of Greater Baltimore and organized cultural events, including bus trips and stage events. The US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq have led her to form a community peace group called Friends and Neighbors for Peace in January, 2005. She organized a series of three talks on the theme of peace and justice in Januaray, 2007 at Faith Presbyterian Church. The speakers were Charles Minor on the US history of war, Dean Pappas on the Middle East, and Monica and Ed Meade on the legal and moral issues of torture.