Kimiko Date

Kimiko Date changed what Japanese tennis players believed was possible for them. World No. 4 in 1995 was not an incremental step, it was a category jump, and she backed it up in the places that matter: semifinals at the 1994 Australian Open, the 1995 French Open and Wimbledon in 1996, plus a record four Japan Open titles. What I keep returning to, though, is the retirement. She walked away in November 1996, at twenty-six, ranked near the top of the world. Athletes almost never get to choose that moment; the sport usually chooses for them, through injury or slow decline. She chose. That takes a clarity about your own life that has nothing to do with a forehand. The later recognition reflects it. BBC 100 Women named her in 2017, and Nikkei made her Woman of the Year in 2018, honors that read less like sports awards than acknowledgments of a person who kept defining her own terms. Born in Kyoto in 1970, she remains one of the few Japanese athletes whose ranking and whose decisions are both worth studying.

Name (English)

Kimiko Date

Name (Japanese)

伊達公子

Reading

だて きみこ

Born

September 28, 1970 (age 55)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Libra / Dog

Origin

Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan

Height

163 cm

Occupation

tennis player / blogger

Awards & achievements

• 2017 BBC 100 Women
• 2018 Nikkei Woman of the Year

• Official sitehttp://kimiko-date.thetennisdaily.jp/
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/kimiko.date/
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimiko%20Date
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BC%8A%E9%81%94%E5%85%AC%E5%AD%90
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q229104

Tags

• Kyoto Prefecture
• tennis player
• blogger

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.