Akiko Kojima

This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Akiko Kojima" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. (May 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Japanese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 3,744 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:児島明子]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|ja|児島明子}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Akiko Kojima
児島 明子
Kojima in 1959
Born	(1936-10-29) October 29, 1936 (age 87) Tokyo City, Japan
Height	1.68 m (5 ft 6 in)
Spouse	Akira Takarada ​ ​ (m. 1966; div. 1984)​
Children	Michiru Kojima (daughter)
Beauty pageant titleholder
Title	Miss Japan 1959 Miss Universe 1959
Hair color	black
Eye color	brown
Major competition(s)	Miss Japan 1959 (Winner) Miss Universe 1959 (Winner)

Akiko Kojima (児島 明子, Kojima Akiko, born October 29, 1936) is a Japanese model and beauty queen. She was crowned Miss Universe 1959, making her the first Japanese or Asian woman to win the title.^[1]

Biography[edit]

Kojima was a 22-year-old model from Tokyo, Japan when she won over four other finalists from Norway, the U.S., England, and Brazil for the 1959 Miss Universe crown in Long Beach, California. At 5 ft 6 in (167.6 cm), Akiko measured 37–23–38 inches (94.0–58.4–96.5 cm).^[1][2] She denied press reports on having undergone breast surgery.^[3] A year later, Akiko crowned Linda Bement from the United States in 1960.

In 1966, Kojima was married to Japanese actor Akira Takarada, who rose to fame in the Toho movie studios doing the Godzilla movies since 1954. Kojima settled into a quiet married life. They later had a daughter, Michiru Kojima, in 1967. They divorced in 1984, and Kojima left with their daughter.

Forty eight years later after her reign, Japanese Riyo Mori won the Miss Universe pageant in 2007.

References[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Akiko Kojima.

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Luz Marina Zuluaga †	Miss Universe 1959	Succeeded by Linda Bement
Preceded by Tomoko Moritake	Miss Japan 1959	Succeeded by Yayoi Foruno

This biography article about an Asian contestant in a beauty pageant is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

This biographical article related to Japan is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e