Hikaru Utada

Utada Hikaru (宇多田 ヒカル, born January 19, 1983), is a Japanese-American singer and songwriter. After releasing the commercially unsuccessful English-language album Precious under the stage name "Cubic U" in 1998, she rose to prominence in 1999 with the release of her second album (and first Japanese-language release), First Love, which sold over eight million copies in Japan and became the best selling Japanese-language album of all time.

She formerly held the record for the highest first-week sales of an album in a single territory, as her Distance album sold over 3 million copies in Japan during the week of March 28, 2001. She has also had three of her Japanese studio albums in the list of Top 10 best-selling albums ever in Japan (number 1, 4, 8) and six of her albums (including one English-language and one compilation) charting within the 275 Best-Selling Japanese albums list. Utada has had twelve number-one singles on the Oricon Singles chart, with two notable record achievements for a female solo or group artist: five million-sellers and four in the Top 100 All-Time Best-selling Singles. It is estimated that Utada has sold more than 52 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists in Japan.

In 2009, she was considered "the most influential artist of the decade" in the Japanese landscape by The Japan Times.^[10] Additionally, Utada is best known in the West for making two theme song contributions to Square Enix and Disney's collaborative video game series Kingdom Hearts: "Simple and Clean" (which is the re-written English-language version of her 10th Japanese single "Hikari") for Kingdom Hearts and "Sanctuary" for Kingdom Hearts II ("Passion" in the Japanese version of the song).

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