Model and actress Keiko Kitagawa has once again topped a poll for the most beautiful Japanese female celebrity.
50,000 Japanese of all ages took part in the poll on Monday (8 May) in a two-hour special episode of TV Asahi’s variety show ‘Nakai Masahiro no Mi ni Naru Toshokan’.
Kitagawa, who has filmed scenes in Singapore, was ranked first by voters between the ages of 20 – 59, and second among voters in their 60s.
This amounted to a massive 3,836 votes, a huge lead over Sayuri Yoshinaga in second place, who had 2,414 votes.
On her official LINE account, Kitagawa responded to the live broadcast, “Just now, I coincidentally found out I topped the ranking. I was surprised! Thank you!”
The Japanese female celebrities in the subsequent places were Nozomi Sasaki in third, Satomi Ishihara in fourth, Masako Natsume in fifth, followed by Yui Aragaki, Mirei Kiritani, Erika Sawajiri, Kyoko Fukada and Haruka Ayase respectively.
Even among just female fans, Kitagawa is immensely popular, having been voted the most beautiful celebrity three years in a row before losing out to Satomi Ishihara last year. She still made second place, though.
The 30-year-old female celebrity made her debut in 2003 as a model for Japanese magazine ‘Seventeen’.
Her first acting role was as Rei Hino, more popularly known as Sailor Mars, in the ‘Sailor Moon’ live-action TV series.
Since then, she has appeared in movies like ‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift’, and starred in Japanese TV dramas such as ‘Buzzer Beat’ and more recently, ‘The After-Dinner Mysteries’.
The latter, in which Kitagawa starred as a police officer with a secret identity, also has a movie version filmed at Singapore’s very own Raffles Hotel, along the iconic Singapore River and on board SuperStar Virgo.
Kitagawa graduated from Meiji University in Tokyo in 2009. She also studied English in California in 2006.