Yumi Matsutoya

Yumi Matsutoya (松任谷 由実), nicknamed Yuming (ユーミン), is a Japanese singer, composer, lyricist and pianist.

Generally the writer of both the lyrics and the music in her songs, she is renowned for her idiosyncratic voice and live performances, and is one of the most prominent figures in the history of Japanese popular music.

Her recording career has been commercially successful with more than 42 million records sold.

She had three brothers and one sister, and her family ran a draper shop called Arai Gofukuten, established in 1912.

Yumi Arai was born in 1954 in Hachiōji, Tokyo.

When she was a junior high school student, she used to go to an Italian restaurant called Chianti, which had opened in 1960.

In those days, many celebrities went to the restaurant; Akira Kurosawa, Yukio Mishima, Kōbō Abe, Seiji Ozawa, Ryu Murakami, Taro Okamoto, Kishin Shinoyama, and Hiroshi "Monsieur" Kamayatsu, who eventually became her first record producer.

It was sung by Katsumi Kahashi, the former guitarist of the influential 1960s Japanese band The Tigers.

After gaining several years of experience as a session musician, she debuted as a singer-songwriter in 1972.

During her early career, she worked under her birth name Yumi Arai (荒井 由実).

In April 1972, Arai entered Tama Art University.

At the same time, she signed with then-publishing company Alfa as a music artist.

At first, she wanted to be a songwriter.

However, the founder of the publishing company, Kunihiko Murai, encouraged her to work as a singer-songwriter.

On July 5, 1972, Arai released her debut single "Henji wa Iranai".

It was produced by Hiroshi "Monsieur" Kamayatsu, the former vocalist of The Spiders.

Released by Toshiba EMI, the label to which she would be affiliated and release all her albums throughout her career, under its Liberty sublabel (with Alfa acting as publishing company), her first single sold only 300 copies.

(It would later feature in re-recorded form on her debut LP, Hikō-ki Gumo.)

She recorded her first full album, Hikō-ki Gumo, with the band Caramel Mama, better known as Tin Pan Alley, which consisted of Haruomi Hosono, Shigeru Suzuki, Tateo Hayashi and Masataka Matsutoya, and it was released by Toshiba EMI under its Express sublabel in November 1973; the title track (and lead-off track) was later used as the theme song for the movie The Wind Rises (2013).

For her next album, MISSLIM, (1974), Masataka Matsutoya, who was the keyboardist of Tin Pan Alley, arranged all of her songs.

In 1975, Arai became known as a composer for "Ichigo Hakusho wo Mou Ichido", a commercially successful song recorded by the folk duo BanBan.

She also gained popularity as a vocalist in the same year through the success of "Ano Hi ni Kaeritai", which became her first number-one hit on Japan's Oricon Charts.

Other famous songs include "Haru-yo, Koi" and "Sweet, Bitter Sweet".

She also uses the name Kureta Karuho (呉田軽穂), which is derived from the American film star Greta Garbo, when offering her work to other musicians.

In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture, it is written that "Yuming incorporated influences from progressive rock and European pop to produce a sophisticated, upper-middle-class female Japanese voice and sound in a contemporary musical and journalistic world dominated by discussions of folk music and social critique. This musical idiom is generally thought to have been first realised on [...] Cobalt Hour".

Her third studio album, Cobalt Hour (1975), features her early famous song "Sotsugyō Shashin".

The same year, it was covered by the chorus group Hi-Fi Set (who also performed on the original song) on their first album with the same name.

The album The 14th Moon and the three albums that ranked in the top 10 of the Japanese charts in 1976 (Cobalt Hour, Yuming Brand, and Hikōki-gumo) "contained several songs which are considered to be early classics of the J-pop genre."

After marrying her musical collaborator Masataka Matsutoya in 1976, Arai began recording under her married name and has continued to do so.

Alfa Music, the publishing company to which she belonged early her in career (later to become a full-fledged record label in 1977), was founded by people who were regular customers at Chianti.

Her nickname "Yuming" was given to her by Sy Chen (シー・ユー・チェン), a Chinese bassist she had a crush on when she was 13 years old.

She began her music career when she was still young.

At the age of 14, she worked as a musician for the first time.

Having worked as a studio musician, she also wrote many original songs.

When she was 17 years old, her first original song titled "Ai wa Totsuzen ni" was released.

Throughout the 1980s, Matsutoya's music was prominently featured in advertisements for Mitsubishi Motors in her native Japan and her image was used to promote their vehicles.

In addition to multiple hit singles, she has obtained enormous commercial success on the Japanese Albums Chart, particularly during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.

The magazine Shūkan Gendai ranked Matsutoya third (behind only Miyuki Nakajima and Masayoshi Son) in a list of the smartest Japanese figures that was determined based on the criteria of "intelligence, determination, sensibility and capability".

In 1990, her album The Gates of Heaven became the first album to be certified "2x million" by the RIAJ, and she has had twenty-one No. 1 albums listed on the Oricon charts.

She is the only artist to have at least one number-one album every year on the Oricon charts for 18 consecutive years.