utada hikaru

Utada Hikaru (宇多田ヒカル Utada Hikaru, born January 19, 1983), or "Hikki" as she is known to fans, is a Japanese pop music star. In an interview, she stated that she plans to use the English-order name to separate her "English" and "Japanese" personas. She was born in New York City, New York to Japanese parents who both had roots in the Japanese music industry: her father, Teruzane Skingg Utada, was a producer, while her mother, Keiko Fuji, was an enka singer. She made her first professional recording at the age of 12, and recorded her first album, Precious, in 1996 under the pseudonym Cubic U. The album led to her career overseas. In a recent MTV interview, Utada said, "Someone in Japan heard it, a Japanese record company, and he said, 'Oh, can't you write in Japanese? You speak Japanese.' And I didn't want to say no, so I had to try it." She moved to Tokyo later that year and attended The American School in Japan while continuing to record on a new contract with Toshiba/EMI. She soon made her mark on Japanese music with her successful single "Automatic", soon followed by the album First Love, which sold over five million copies in a month during March and April of 1999 and placed Utada among the 100 wealthiest people in Japan. She also broke the record of units sold on a single album in Japan; she still holds the record to this day. Utada returned to New York in 2000 to attend Columbia University as a freshman, but took leave from it within the year. She continued to record, however, and her two subsequent albums, Distance (2001) and DEEP RIVER (2002), also went multi-platinum. Shortly after the release of the latter she announced her marriage to Kazuaki Kiriya, a photographer and director fifteen years her senior, in September 2002. Her 2001 song "Can You Keep A Secret" was not released in the United States as a single. Its music video received some attention as part of International Week, which coincided with the 2001 EMA's, on the American channel MTV2. That video's airplay was likely Utada's first chance at exposure in the United States. So far she is best known in the western hemisphere for singing "Simple And Clean", the theme to the video game series "Kingdom Hearts," which is an English version of her popular song "Hikari". She also performed a well-received duet with Foxy Brown, "Blow My Whistle", which was featured on the Rush Hour 2 soundtrack. Her most successful singles include "First Love", "Automatic", "Wait And See", "Final Distance", "For You/Time Limit", "Traveling", "Colors", and "Sakura Drops." On October 5th, 2004, Utada Hikaru released her debut US album Exodus under the name "Utada" (for fear of U.S. fans mutilating her Japanese nickname, Hikki). It was released nearly a month earlier, on September 9th, in Japan, with a special booklet and housed in a cardboard slipcase. In an MTV interview, Utada said: "There really aren't any completely asian people singing right now. For me, it's an experiment to see what people are gonna think of it." But her American debut as an Island Def Jam Music Group artist was met with indifference by an American market already saturated with female pop singers.