Hikaru Utada

Utada Hikaru (Japanese: Utada Hikaru／Song Hikaru, Romanized: Utada Hikaru, January 19, 1983 -) is a Japanese-American singer-songwriter and music producer. His 1999 debut album "First Love" set the highest sales record in Japanese music history. Hikaru Utada was born in New York City, United States, the only son of music producer Terumi Utada and enka singer Keiko Fuji. In 1998, Hikaru Utada successfully launched a rhythm and blues trend in Japan after releasing his Japanese debut single "Automatic/time will tell" under his real name. Later, he established his position in the Japanese music scene with several best-selling albums such as "First Love", "Distance" and "DEEP RIVER". After Utada issued a declaration of "human activities" in 2010, he briefly left the music scene from 2011 to 2015, and then returned in 2016 and continues to be active in the music scene to this day. As a singer-songwriter, Utada Hikaru has been heavily involved in song creation since his debut. Later, he also began to participate in the arrangement and production of songs. He is one of the few top-level all-round singers in terms of lyrics, music, arrangement, supervision, and singing. With more than 37 million physical albums sold, he became the tenth-highest-selling singer in the Heisei era. Among the ten best-selling albums in the history of Japanese pop music, Utada Hikaru alone has three, including "First Love", which became the best-selling album of Japanese pop music with a sales volume of 7.69 million. The second album "Distance" was also the album with the highest single-week sales in global music history. The 2007 single "Flavor Of Life" also broke the world record for digital sales of songs at that time, and the number of downloads eventually exceeded 8 million. In addition, Hikaru Utada became the second-highest-paid musician in the Heisei era with an income of more than 7.6 billion yen, second only to Tetsuya Komuro. Utada also entered the European and American music scene and became the seventh Japanese singer in history to have an album in the top 100 of the Billboard 200 album chart, making him a well-known Japanese singer in Europe and the United States.