is a Japanese ''

kayōkyoku is a Japanese pop music genre, which became a base of modern J-pop. ''The Japan Times'' described ''kayōkyoku'' as "standard Japanese pop" or " Shōwa-era pop". ''Kayōkyoku'' represents a blend of Western and Japanese musical scales. Music i ...

'' singer. She also sings

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

chanson A (, , french: chanson française, link=no, ; ) is generally any lyric-driven French song, though it most often refers to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music. The genre had origins in the monophonic s ...

canzone Literally "song" in Italian, a ''canzone'' (, plural: ''canzoni''; cognate with English ''to chant'') is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal. Sometimes a composition w ...

, and

min'yō , ''Nihon min'yō'', Japanese ''min'yō'' or Japanese folk music is a genre of traditional Japanese music. Characteristics Styles Many ''min'yō'' are connected to forms of work or to specific trades and were originally sung between work ...

. She made her debut in 2005. She attended the

59th NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen The , referred to from hereon as "Kōhaku", was aired on December 31, 2008 from NHK Hall in Japan. The music show on New Year's Eve is broadcast on both television and radio, and divides the most popular music artists of the year into competing te ...

. Her song reached number-one on the Japan's

Oricon , established in 1999, is the holding company at the head of a Japanese corporate group that supplies statistics and information on music and the music industry in Japan and Western music. It started as, which was founded by Sōkō Koike in Nov ...

charts in January 2009. By this, she became the eldest singer to reach the number-one position on single charts in Oricon history. The single was on the charts for 64 weeks and sold 568,334 copies during that time.

Discography

Albums

* (2006) * ''Second Story'' (2008) * (2009) * ''Encore: Jazz Standard'' (2010) * * * * ''Junko Akimoto BEST'' (2014)

Singles

* (2005) * (2007) * (2008) * (2009) * (2010) * * * * * (2015) * "Rose" (2015) * (2016)

References

External links

*
Official website
1947 births Living people Japanese women pop singers Japanese women jazz singers Singers from Tokyo 21st-century Japanese singers 21st-century Japanese women singers {{Japan-singer-stub