Kimiko Itoh (伊藤君子, also romanised Kimiko Ito) is a jazz singer who started somewhere else. She was born on 11 July 1946 on Shodoshima, the island in Kagawa Prefecture, and by her own account she decided at the age of four that she would be a singer after hearing Hibari Misora on the radio. She moved to Tokyo at nineteen and studied oil painting at Musashino Art University. After graduating she took a job tracing and colouring cels for an animation studio, working on series including Obake no Q-Taro and Ribbon no Kishi, and through the studio's director she ended up singing with a Hawaiian band. Her first records were not jazz at all. Under the name Maki Nakahara (中原マキ) she cut five pop-enka singles for Toshiba Records in 1969 and 1970, among them "Shiawase ni Furuete" and "Onna wa Blues".

A meeting with a jazz pianist turned her toward jazz singing, and she trained under Yasushi Sawada. She re-debuted under her own name in 1982 with Birdland (Continental HL-5016), recorded on 12 and 13 May 1982 and made up of jazz standards and repertoire: "A Child Born", "Confirmation", "My Romance", "Misty", "No More Blues" and "'Round Midnight", with "Birdland" as the title track. Her second album, Songs For You, followed from sessions on 8 and 10 December 1982. Masahiko Satoh arranged it and played piano and electric piano, with Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums, plus a flute section and strings. In 1983 Continental took her to New York for The Way We Were, a quartet record with Roland Hanna on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums. From April 1984 she spent about six months in New York, singing at the club Sutton's.

The New York connection became the spine of her career. A Touch of Love (1986) was recorded at CBS/Sony's Shinanomachi Studio with Satoh again conducting, and For Lovers Only (1987) moved the whole project to New York: Satoh's arrangements, Eddie Gomez and Steve Gadd as the rhythm section, a full string section led by concertmaster David Nadien, Terumasa Hino on flugelhorn on "Let It Be Me" and Michael Brecker on tenor saxophone on "For All We Know". She is also billed as a featured guest on Eddie Gomez's own album Power Play (Columbia, 1988), which was also produced by Kiyoshi Itoh, who produced most of her records from 1986 to 1997. In 1987 she won the grand prize at the Japan Jazz Vocal Award, presented by Jazz World magazine.

Follow Me (1989) is the record that carried her abroad. Steve Gadd co-produced it and played drums, Richard Tee arranged the rhythm section and the strings and played Rhodes, and Gomez played bass, recorded and mixed by Jay Messina. It was released in Japan and the United States on the same day and entered the Radio & Records contemporary jazz chart at number 16, reportedly the first time a Japanese female vocalist had done so. The same New York team made A Natural Woman (1990), which adds Chuck Mangione on flugelhorn, Kirk Whalum on tenor saxophone, Will Lee, David Spinozza and Ralph MacDonald, and Here I Am (1992, her first record on the One Voice label), which brings in Chris Botti and Ronnie Cuber. In the readers' poll of Swing Journal, Japan's leading jazz monthly, she was ranked the number one female vocalist every year from 1988 to 1996.

On 24 March 1994 she played the Japan Society in New York with Gadd, Will Lee, MacDonald, John Tropea, Ronnie Cuber and the pianist Soichi Noriki; the concert was issued as An Evening with Kimiko Itoh. Sophisticated Lady (1995) added Michael Brecker on three tracks and Eddie Gomez on three more, and Standards My Way (1996) paired Brecker again with a rhythm section of Yoshio Suzuki on bass, Motohiko Hino on drums, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto on piano and Ralph MacDonald on percussion, with Noriki arranging.

On 17 July 1997, in the Stravinski Auditorium at the Montreux Jazz Festival, she sang a duo concert with Makoto Ozone, introduced from the stage by the festival's founder, Claude Nobs, and released that November as At The Montreux Jazz Festival. Ozone then produced, arranged and conducted her next studio record, KIMIKO (2000), made at Avatar Studios in New York on 5 to 8 March 2000 with Chris Minh Doky and Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass, Clarence Penn and Gregory Hutchinson on drums, the guitarist Joe Caro and a string section. KIMIKO won the Japanese vocal award at the Swing Journal Jazz Disc Awards that year. Ozone produced Once You've Been In Love (2004) as well, and in the same year a re-recording of "Follow Me", together with the original song "River of Crystals", was used in Mamoru Oshii's animated film Innocence, which brought her voice to a much wider international audience.

Her later work moved in two directions at once. At home she turned to the Tsugaru dialect of northern Honshu: Jazzdaga? Jazzdaja! (2007) sets standards including "My Favorite Things", "Summertime" and "Fly Me to the Moon" in Tsugaru-ben, and Tsugaru-ben Jazz: Jazz Dabe! Jazz Dasa! (Savoy, 2015) returned to the idea with Takana Miyamoto on piano and Gene Jackson on drums. Abroad she recorded Makkana Ohirune (2010) in Berlin on 22 to 24 February and 30 and 31 March 2010 as a duo-led quartet with Aki Takase, Nobuyoshi Ino and Heinrich Köbberling. In 2017 she paid tribute to the singer who first made her want to sing with Kimiko Sings Hibari (Savoy / Nippon Columbia), which she presented at Kawasaki Jazz 2017 that November, and Billboard Japan's report on the festival credits Terumasa Hino as a guest on its "Lover, Come Back to Me". She had also been a visiting professor at Shobi Gakuen's music program, and Billboard Japan notes that she worked with its big band during her last three years there. Her most recent album is Memories ~ Sings The Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman (Pony Canyon), released on 23 April 2025, when she was 78. She turned 80 in July 2026.

Itoh is a standards singer with an unusually American production pedigree. The core of her catalog, from Follow Me through Standards My Way, was cut in New York with rhythm sections drawn from the city's studio and jazz world: Gadd, Tee, Gomez, Will Lee and MacDonald on one side, Brecker, Cuber and Botti as soloists on the other. That sound sits closer to the polished contemporary jazz of the late 1980s than to bebop, which is why Discogs files several of her albums under Contemporary Jazz and Smooth Jazz. Her earliest and latest work is plainer: Birdland and The Way We Were are small-group standards dates, and the Montreux concert is a voice-and-piano duo with Makoto Ozone.

She came to jazz late and from outside it, and that shows in her repertoire. A painter by training, a pop-enka singer by first profession and an admirer of Hibari Misora from childhood, she has kept one foot in the Japanese song tradition: the Tsugaru-dialect albums and the 2017 Hibari tribute are jazz readings of that world rather than departures from it, and Billboard Japan describes her as having a strong interest in the music of northern Japan.

Outside Japan she is best known for "Follow Me" and "River of Crystals" from the Innocence soundtrack.