Yoshie Takeshita

Yoshie Takeshita was born in March 1978 in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, and played setter for the Japanese national women's volleyball team at the 2004, 2008 and 2012 Olympics, spending her club career with JT Marvelous. She is listed at 159 cm. In a sport where reach is close to a prerequisite, that number should have ended the conversation before it started. It did not, because the setter's job is not to be tall but to be fast, exact and unflinching under pressure, and by all accounts she was all three. Three consecutive Olympic cycles as the player running a national team's offense is not a fluke of selection; it is a coaching staff concluding, over and over, that nobody else could do the job as well. After retiring she moved into coaching, leading Victorina Himeji, and now serves in an executive advisory capacity. What I take from her career is not the inspirational framing people usually reach for, but something more concrete: a demonstration that in a sport obsessed with physical measurables, judgment is also a measurable, and hers was elite.

Name (English)

Yoshie Takeshita

Name (Japanese)

竹下佳江

Reading

たけした よしえ

Born

March 18, 1978 (age 48)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Pisces / Horse

Origin

Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan

Height

159 cm

Occupation

volleyball player

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/takechanman0318/
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshie%20Takeshita
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%AB%B9%E4%B8%8B%E4%BD%B3%E6%B1%9F
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q234659

Tags

• Fukuoka Prefecture
• volleyball player

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.