Official Utada Hikaru Thread

Utada Hikaru (宇多田 ヒカル), who is also known as Hikaru Utada and the mononym Utada, is a Japanese-American singer-songwriter and producer. Born in the United States to Japanese parents, record producer Utada Teruzane and enka singer Keiko Fuji, Utada began to write music and lyrics at an early age and often traveled to Tokyo as a result of their father's job. Eventually, a recording contract with Toshiba-EMI was signed and, under the stage name Cubic U, Utada released their English-language debut album Precious in early 1998, but it was a commercial failure. In the following year, heavily influenced by R&B and dance-pop, their Japanese-language debut First Love was released and became an instant success. Backed by the massive success of singles "Automatic", "Time Will Tell", and "Movin' On Without You", the album sold two million copies in its first week in Japan, topped the Oricon charts for six non-consecutive weeks and went on to sell six million more throughout the rest of 1999. First Love eventually became the country's best-selling album of all time.

Their following album Distance was released in early 2001 and spawned Utada's biggest hit singles—"Addicted to You", "Wait & See (Risk)" and "Can You Keep a Secret?"—which became million-sellers. The album was commercially successful and broke several sales records after three million copies were sold in its first week of availability in Japan, instantly becoming the country's fastest-selling album. In 2002, backed by chart-topping singles such as "Traveling", "Hikari" and "Sakura Drops", Deep River, which incorporates elements of pop folk, was released and went on to become one of Japan's top-selling records of all-time. Subsequent full-length releases—Exodus, Ultra Blue and Heart Station—achieved million-selling status certified by the Recording Industry Association of Japan. After a prolonged hiatus, Utada released acoustic-driven Fantôme and Hatsukoi, which reached number-one on the Oricon album charts.

By the end of the 2000s, Utada was deemed "the most influential artist of the decade" in the Japanese music landscape by The Japan Times. Utada's commercial success has made them one of Japan's top-selling recording artists of all time with over 37 million records sold since launching her career in the late 1990s. Twelve of their singles have reached number-one on the Oricon Singles Chart, while ten of their albums have become chart-toppers. Six of their full-length releases are among the country's highest-selling albums of all time, including First Love, Distance and Deep River, which are among the top ten best-selling records of Japan's music history. Additionally, Utada is best known by international audiences for writing and producing four theme-song contributions to Square Enix and Disney's collaborative video game series Kingdom Hearts: "Simple and Clean", "Sanctuary", "Don't Think Twice" and "Face My Fears".

On November 1, 2019, it was released a Utada collaboration with singer-songwriter Sheena Ringo, called "Roman to Soroban LDN ver." ("The Sun and the Moon", in English). It was featured in Sheena's best of album Apple of Universal Gravity. An alternative version of the song, called "Roman to Soroban TYO ver.", was available on November 25. On November 27, 2019, Utada released their first single in over a year with "Shonen Jidai". It appears as track #5 on the Inoue Yosue Tribute album. Utada also did a live rendition of the song on her 2003 live DVD UH Live Streaming 20 Dai wa Ikeike!

On 3 December 2020 was announced that Takeru Sato & Hikari Mitsushima will star a Netflix drama based on Hikaru Utada’s songs “First Love” & “Hatsukoi”, “First Love Hatsukoi” is scheduled to be released sometime in 2022.

On June 11th, 2021 Utada confirmed rumors that they are attracted to women during a Dazed interview, being quoted as well as saying their current celebrity crush is Meg thee Stallion.

On June 26, 2021, Utada came out as non-binary in an Instagram livestream. Utada has supported same-sex marriage and, in discussing discomfort with how titles like Ms. or Mrs. closely identify someone by sex and marital status, supported widespread use of the gender-neutral title Mx.

On August 22, 2013, Utada's mother, Keiko Fuji, died by apparent suicide by jumping from the thirteenth floor of a 28-floor condominium building in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Hikaru has been open about their mother's struggles with mental health and encourages the education on the topic, as well as for people to seek assistance for their illnesses. They have been most notably quoted as stating “She is finally freed from her agony,” They also said that they are “beyond sad” because of their mother’s death. “I am suffering from a sense of remorse.” Despite their mother’s condition, Utada said that they are only left with memories of her mother laughing. They also described their late mother as someone who is “impulsive like a child but with an innocent charm that attracted everyone’s attention.”

This thread is to discuss any news regarding her music career.

Please be respectful in the thread.

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The excitement for Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time was already about as high as we thought it could possibly be, what with the eight-year-plus wait since the last installment in the Rebuild of Evangelion series and the fact that this movie is meant to, once and for all, put a period on one of history’s most discussed and influential franchises ever. Then we realized it actually was possible to reach a more feverish level of anticipation when it was announced that J-pop legend Utada Hikaru would be returning to provide Thrice Upon a Time’s theme song.

And now, Eva’s handlers have kicked things up one notch further with a brand-new trailer that previews Utada’s “One Last Kiss” plus gives us a look at a whole bunch of previously unseen footage from the movie.

https://soranews24.com/2020/12…e%E3%80%90video%E3%80%91/

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Anime movie Evangelion: 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time, which was scheduled to open on Jan. 23, has announced it will once again be delaying its premiere date because of the recent state of emergency declared in Japan.

The new release date is still unknown. In an official statement, the producers extend their sincerest apologies to fans who have been patiently waiting to see the movie and ask for their understanding until it can be enjoyed safely.

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time is the fourth and final installment in the Rebuild of Evangelion movie series, produced by Studio Khara as a remake of the 1995 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. The series follows teenager Ikari Shinji as he is forced to defend humanity from existential threat by piloting a giant robot at the behest of his authoritarian father.

https://otakumode.com/news/600…e-Announces-Further-Delay

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Quote from nippon.com

A New Artist Spreads His Wings

At just 23, singer-songwriter Fujii Kaze has made a name for himself as one of the brightest prospects in Japanese music. His songs are marked by original, freewheeling, and catchy melodies and unique lyrics, often sung in the dialect of his native Okayama in Fujii’s supple yet sturdy voice and backed by his own skillful piano playing.

He made his debut in November 2019, when his single “Nan-Nan (YouTube)” was released as a digital download. Today, when subscription services are rapidly becoming the mainstream way of listening to music even in Japan, it is no longer unusual for artists to make their music available in digital form only. Even so, there was something a little different about the way Fujii set about making his debut: he has built his career so far mostly through his presence on YouTube.

Since he was just 12, Fujii has posted cover versions of a wide variety of musical genres on his “Fujii Kaze” YouTube channel. Even since making his official debut, he has continued to release music videos, performance footage, and live streams via YouTube. At the same time, he has strictly limited his appearances on mainstream conventional media like TV and music magazines.

A tour that was originally planned to coincide with the release of his first album, Help Ever Hurt Never, in June 2020 had to be canceled, but he soon made up for this disappointment by uploading a series of live streams featuring himself playing and talking at the piano. These triumphant performances won him further acclaim, helping him to turn a potential disaster into an opportunity.

Fujii is well on the way to building a successful career on own terms—relying on YouTube, streaming services, Instagram, and Twitter. In that sense, he seems to mark the arrival of a new generation in Japanese popular music.

The tracks he has covered on YouTube suggest a voracious appetite and eclectic tastes, but his own music would probably be categorized as R&B based on its groove. I decided a good way to get a handle on Japan’s latest R&B sensation would be to talk to Matsuo Kiyoshi, one of Japan leading experts on the genre, to see how he views the new phenomenon. This interview took place remotely on October 28, 2020, the day before Fujii’s concert at Tokyo’s Budōkan.

A Family Steeped in Music

Matsuo says he first became aware of Fujii Kaze around the fall of 2019, or toward the end of the year. “Not long after that, someone at Universal Music told me Fujii was going to make his official debut with the label. By then the hype was starting to build, and I started to feel a sense of excitement—that maybe this guy had the potential to become something special. Like everyone else, I started going back over his YouTube videos, tracing the course of his development. In some of his early videos, he’s still this fresh-faced kid, playing alongside a slightly older guy who looked like he might be his older brother. The fact that he was already posting videos at such an early age—you’d have to assume it was done under a parent’s influence. I started to wonder if maybe his parents were musicians or something.”

Kaze’s older brother Sora, also a musician who plays piano and saxophone, has a profile quite similar to Kaze’s, which is only natural since they’re brothers. The father isn’t a musician himself, but he’s certainly a fan, and seems to have introduced his sons to all different kinds of music while they were growing up.

“I’m not surprised to hear that he developed his ear for this type of mostly American music under his father’s influence,” notes Matsuo. “In fact, it might be the case that the children of fans and critics are exposed to more types of music than the children of actual musicians. Professional musicians don’t tend to listen to other music when they’re practicing, and compared to fans and critics who might have music on all day long, a lot of musicians may not listen to all that much music in terms of volume, although they may listen more intensely. The breadth of Fujii Kaze’s musical tastes at such a young age shows you just how bad things can get growing up in a music-loving family!”

Fresh Yet Familiar

As a general rule, you can often sense at an early stage when a newcomer is going to be someone who breaks the mold. But at the same time there is something about them that reminds you—in a positive way—of what came before. Fujii’s music feels especially fresh now, at a moment when the music industry is facing unprecedented difficulties. But there’s also something almost nostalgic about it—a reminder of how things used to be. It reminds you: this is the way new stars used to burst onto the scene back in the 1980s and 1990s. The person I’m thinking of in particular, of course, is Utada Hikaru.

Fujii Kaze’s music has that accessibility that is one of the positive qualities of Japanese pop music. But there is also something heterodox, almost foreign, about it. That’s part of what makes him reminiscent of Utada, I think. Probably it’s the first time we’ve seen something like this since she first hit. With Utada, her background quickly became clear: the important presence of the singer Fuji Keiko, her mother, but also her father Utada Teruzane, who was absolutely crazy about American music. It was the perfect balance. With Fujii Kaze, who grew up in a provincial city, I think that there is a similar balance between his rootedness in the local culture of Okayama, together with this massive injection of foreign pop music under his father’s influence.

A look at Twitter makes it seem that Fujii hasn’t yet prompted the expected reaction from people in the music business. According to Matsuo, this is because he’s difficult to pigeonhole. “He’s got an R&B feel about him, along with a jazz sensibility, and even elements of classical. And it’s all nicely balanced. Perhaps that’s why? I wonder if he’s deliberately trying to maintain a certain amount of ambiguity about where he sees his own roots, or if that’s just the kind of person he is.

“But I think the reason why he’s drawing such passionate support from some people is that there’s something in his vocal style that is really reminiscent of Japan’s kayōkyoku pop standards—in his way of playing with the melody, the flow of his vocals—so that even though he covers so many foreign songs, something about his music remains distinctively Japanese. It’s not entirely in line with the conventions of American, or Western, popular music styles.”

Part of that authenticity comes from the use of dialect in his songs, Matsuo adds. “He spent all his life in Okayama until he came to Tokyo, so it probably feels natural to him to sing the same way he always spoke when he was growing up. But I get the sense that he uses it as a tool as well. He has this technique that enables him to fall back on dialect in places where it would be difficult to make the words fit in standard Japanese. And he uses this technique very skillfully to enable him to fit the words and melody neatly together.”

Indeed, in a song like “Mō-Eh-Wa (YouTube),” the words hardly sound like Japanese anymore, which certainly helps give it a sense of freshness. There is precedent in entertainers like Kuwata Keisuke, the lead singer with the Southern All Stars, who has always twisted the sounds of Japanese so that it sounds as though he’s singing in a foreign language.

Matsuo agrees on the impact of this nonstandard Japanese in Fujii’s music. “A few years ago, there was a promotional film (YouTube) produced by a local government in Miyazaki Prefecture in Kyūshū that featured people speaking the local dialect, cleverly arranged to sound like French. It created quite a stir, but actually this idea has been around for a while. There’s a kind of methodology to Fujii’s approach: a way of grabbing people and getting his message across. I think maybe that’s why he chose to go with YouTube, rather than say Sound Cloud or some other audio file-sharing service.”

Not Just a Pretty Face

Fujii is more than just a singer, though. His skillful and energetic piano playing is also a large part of what makes his YouTube videos so impressive, as Matsuo explains.

“I think any time you encounter someone with really great technique like that—and this is not limited to the piano—it makes you wonder about this person, and the kind of life he’s led to get this far. In the case of Fujii Kaze, I think he just gives viewers a sense of excitement: Here’s this young, good-looking kid . . . where did he learn to play so well? It’s quite different from watching some old geezer maestro play!”

As a musician, Fujii clearly has the chops to succeed. But how does Matsuo see him from a producer’s perspective?

“One of the first things that hits you is his appearance—he’d stand out even if he wasn’t singing. As far as his music’s concerned, there’s a strong sense that he’s pretty much self-contained—that what he needs to make his music is there already inside him. The production on this album was done by Yaffle. It’s quite a light production, really just concentrating on getting the sound right, and there is nothing in the production that gets in the way or obscures Fujii’s individuality. The production is so restrained it almost seems as if the artist has produced himself.”

Globally, one of the major trends in R&B right now is ‘trap’—a type of slow-tempo hip-hop with a relaxed rhythm and heavy bass beat, with rap or other vocals over a backing track mixed in with electronic sounds. As Matsuo notes, though, Fujii is charting a course that has nothing to do with this mainstream style of the moment. “In the States, trap is one of the best-selling styles of music there is, but I guess you could say that Fujii isn’t trying to break away from the mainstream type of R&B music that’s popular in Japan.

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Updated main post due to change in pronouns, etc