Angela Aki Tries to break Japan

[Mulboyne]

[Mulboyne]

From Japan Zone:

...Popular singer songwriter Angela Aki (29) is getting married again, according to her official website. The lucky man is 41-year-old "A-san", who has worked with her as a music director since before her major label debut...

This is news to me:

...Her Japanese father is Aki Kiyoshi, the owner and co-founder of the major AEON chain of English conversation schools.

[Mulboyne]

Angela Aki is now a fully-fledged J-pop star as this video shows:



According to her bio, she was brought up in Japan so is completely bilingual. Her initial marketing described her as a an American singer songwriter and her first CDs were sold in the overseas artists section of the main chains. Since performing the Final Fantasy XII theme song, "Kiss Me Good-Bye", she now appears exclusively in the J-pop section and has just appeared on an NHK summer special.

[Mulboyne]

There's an interesting interview with the singer in the Japan Times:

...A vivacious pianist, Aki reveals that her love for the instrument grew out of a difficult upbringing in the most conservative pocket of Japan. "It was the one thing that kept me sane in Shikoku. My mom was the only foreigner, so it was like (I was) Michael Jackson coming to school!" she smiles contritely...While her actual mother struggled to get to grips with the Japanese language in the family of four, Aki's duty as big sister enhanced her desire to come to terms with her identity..."I went through a period hating it, thinking, 'Why us? why this situation?' But once I grew older, I realized the reason was because of my mom, and I had a negative period when I probably put her through hell. I wouldn't take back my past, but I would take back that. I wish I could have protected her more. I am very close with my mom now"...

...Her ability to effectively combine not just the Japanese and English language, but also the difference in sentiment, is something few of her mixed-Japanese contemporaries have mastered. By separating the two languages into distinct modes of approach, she has developed a technique that enables her to marry the two. "In English, it's about how you cleverly capture the emotional part that you feel in your heart, then process it to the brain and the brain writes the song," she explains. "But in Japanese it's the opposite: Whatever you feel emotionally, you let the heart hold the pencil and the heart does the writing. "It's not that you don't think things through in Japanese, but I find it more emotional. You can use fewer words. You can have five notes in Japanese and just say 'us' ('watashi-tachi')! The value of each word is so much more and that's why I don't mix languages line by line; I have to totally separate the modes. Once you can turn off the English songwriting part of you, you will be awakened by beautiful words that surround your daily life in Japanese, then you can go back and forth between the two"...