Namie Amuro Official Website

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Namie is glad to have been a singer who deeply touched the hearts of her fans for the past 25 years, and for that, she is filled with gratitude. Following her announcement, it was announced that Namie’s official website, fanclub, online store, and FaceBook page would shut down on September 30. The official video, and special Olympic gold video, features Namie Amuro (pictured) walking across a bridge with gold architecture. Six music videos were produced for the single; the first being a lyric video, which lasts two minutes and 46 seconds. Namie Amuro (Japanese: 安室 奈美恵) is a Japanese singer, born September 20, 1977 in Naha, Okinawa.She was the top J-Pop star of the 1990s, with a long string of number-one hits. When she had a baby in the late 1990s her popularity went down, but her albums became popular again when she released Queen of Hip-Hop.Her next album Play became #1. Her 2008 hit single, 60s 70s 80s, sold.

Isabella Steger

Asia deputy editor

Last year, US sales of Taylor Swift’s new album Reputation crossed a million a week after it was released in November. Over in Japan, in the same month, Namie Amuro also cleared that milestone just as quickly with her newest album.

The difference, however, is that while Swift is in her prime, Amuro is two decades past hers. Though she’s not a household name in much of the world, she’s an icon in her native Japan who represents the golden era of its pop-music industry, and whose influence extends far beyond just music.

Nostalgic Amuro fans have now bought more than 2 million copies of her last album ever. Finally, a triple-CD, 52-song offering, was released in November, shortly after the queen of J-pop announced on her 40th birthday that she plans to retire on Sept. 16, 2018.

“Amuraa” devotees

Born in Naha in Okinawa, Amuro debuted as a solo artist in 1992 and quickly established herself as Japan’s biggest pop star of the 1990s, after almost a decade where Japan had no definitive female idol (paywall).

Working with the legendary Japanese music producer Tetsuya Komuro, whose label Avex Trax dominated J-pop in the 1990s, Amuro helped popularize Eurobeat-inspired music in Japan. (Komuro will also retire.)

Her biggest hit was “Can You Celebrate?,” a pop ballad released in 1997 that to date remains the best-selling single by a solo artist in Japan.

As well as her legions of fans in Japan, she’s also a cultural touchpoint for expat Japanese like Midori Komachi, a 30-year-old violinist living in London. Komachi became a fan at age 7 after seeing Amuro perform one of her hits, “Chase the Chance,” on TV. As a child, Komachi wrote out the lyrics to Amuro’s lyrics, including Japanese characters too complex for her age, she said, and after her family moved overseas she relied on a Japanese TV broadcaster, JSTV, for her Amuro fix. “I remember desperately writing a letter to JSTV to say ‘I am a huge fan of Namie Amuro, please broadcast more programs featuring her on JSTV!'” said Komachi.

While Amuro herself has cited Janet Jackson as one of her biggest inspirations, the Japanese singer is most often compared to Madonna. “When you look at the arc of her career, it’s a good comparison,” said Patrick St. Michel, a music writer based in Tokyo. “Both of them broke out at young ages, and over the course of their careers, both went into quite radically different styles.” Amuro would later start to experiment more with genres like R&B and hip hop, including a re-recording of “Waterfalls” with TLC in 2013.

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Like Madonna, Amuro was also a style icon in Japan, and helped fuel gyaru street style, in which girls displayed the tanned skin, dyed hair, heavy make-up, chunky heels, and short skirts associated with areas of Tokyo like Shibuya. (Gyaru is a romanization of the English word “gal.”)

As W. David Marx, a writer on Japanese pop culture explained, Amuro never explicitly associated herself with the look, but her Okinawan tan skin and dyed hair made her the perfect idol for aspiring gyaru. A legion of Amuro fans who tried to emulate her became known as “Amuraa,” although, as Vogue noted, Amuro later veered away from gyaru style, instead embracing high-end fashion brands such as Chanel, and hip-hop streetwear.

Okinawa’s pride

It wasn’t just the tanned look of her tropical hometown that Amuro popularized: She also helped propel Okinawa in Japanese consciousness from a place seen as a distant, culturally isolated backwater best known for its US military bases, to one that became synonymous with being cool. Amuro’s success, said St. Michel, helped pave the way for other artists such as the girl groups Speed and Max, who trained at the same talent academy in Okinawa as Amuro.

Okinawa has jumped on the Amuro retirement bandwagon, using the singer in a recent tourism campaign ahead of her final show ever, which will be performed there on Sept. 15, a day before her retirement.

Fans from all around Japan are traveling to Okinawa to bid their idol farewell, with events including an exhibition of articles and photos of Amuro organized by a local newspaper, an hour-long fireworks show (link in Japanese) set to Amuro’s music, and public viewings (link in Japanese) of recordings of her concerts.

End of an era

Amuro has been called the “songstress of the Heisei era,” referring to the fact that her retirement comes just before the current era named for the reigning emperor draws to a close, with the abdication of Akihito in April 2019.

Basking in a collective sense of nostalgia, many Japanese people will look back on the Heisei era, which began in January 1989—just before the country entered a prolonged economic slump—for its most illustrious and definitive moments. For many, that means recalling the heyday of J-pop, long before K-pop became a global phenomenon, and when Japan’s record labels, free from the demands of the internet, could still rely solely on selling millions of CDs and other merchandise. Today, young Japanese people are as likely to listen to foreign artists and stream music online (although physical music remains extremely popular) as young people anywhere else.

Namie Amuro Official WebsiteNamie Amuro Official Website

But there’s no stopping the Amuro merch juggernaut. More than 800,000 people attended her farewell concerts earlier this year, not only in Japan, but also in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A DVD of her Finally tour, released in August, sold over a million copies in three days, the first music-video offering to cross the million mark in Japan.

Komachi, a self-described “serious Amuraa,” will get a copy of the DVD for her birthday from her family. In the age of streaming, nothing beats holding on to a piece of Amuro history.

Namie Amuro is a highly successful recording artist, actress, businesswoman, artist, and dancer. She made her debut when she was only 14 years old, and through rising success in Tokyo and trying fashion modeling and acting, she found phenomenal success and is now often dubbed as “the queen of Japanese pop”. Her bestselling singles include J-Pop hits like Don’t Wanna Cry (1996), Can You Celebrate? (1997), and Love Story (2012). She also provided the song Toi et Moi, the ending theme song from the Japanese version of Pokemon: The First Movie (1998).

To someone who only knows her music career, Namie Amuro’s life could seem like one long fairytale of glamour and success. However, her family history and personal life almost seem like the plot of a drama, full of twists and turns and unimaginable endings and beginnings. You could say that she is like the beautiful heroine in a tragic story. Even if you are not a fan of her music, I am sure you could at least sympathize with her and the struggles she has faced in her life.

Namie Amuro was born on September 20th, 1977 in Naha, Okinawa, as one of three children. Her father, whose name is unknown to the general public, left her family while Namie was only four years old, so she was taken care of by her mother, Taira Emiko, alone. Her mother took two jobs in order to support the family in which she worked as a nursery employee in the day and as a bar hostess during the night. Namie was “discovered” when she was twelve years old and made her debut as part of a girl group called Super Monkey’s. After moving to Tokyo, she finally found success as a lone artist.

Taking care of three kids as a single mother couldn’t have been easy for Emiko. Working two jobs to support her family, it is easy to assume that Namie, her mother, and her siblings didn’t have much money while she was growing up. Losing her father at such a young age must also have been very difficult for Namie. She was probably very close to her mother, who was unhappy about her leaving for Tokyo to pursue her career.

In 1997, Namie became pregnant at the age of 20 and married her boyfriend at the time, Masaharu Maruyama (also known as Sam), who was 35 at that time. It is said that her sudden marriage popularized the concept of a “shotgun wedding” in Japan. She had a baby boy whom she named Heart (Haruto Amuro), and she used to have a tattoo of her son’s name on her left arm. A little over four years after her marriage, she and Sam got a divorce. This could have been for a number of reasons such as stress, getting married so suddenly and at a young age, or perhaps even from observing her mom’s struggle of being a single parent since she was a child, Namie ended up being a single mom as well.

As if the stress of losing her father, her career, and being a young mother wasn’t enough, Namie suffered even more tragedy in her 20s. She lost her mom, Taira Emiko, a year after Namie had given birth to her baby boy. Taira Emiko was murdered by her second husband’s brother, who was named Taira Kenji. While Emiko was walking with her then husband, Taira Kenji knocked them down repeatedly using his car, and then attacked the couple with an axe. Emiko’s husband tried to protect her using a steel pipe, but his efforts couldn’t save her. After that, Taira Kenji fled the scene in his car, and was later found to have committed suicide by poisoning himself with insecticide.

Taira Kenji did not have any previous history of recorded violence, and this attack came as a shock for not only the family but the wider community of Okinawa, which is a generally very peaceful and safe place to live. However, the attack by Kenji on Taira Emiko was extremely brutal and intended to inflict as much harm as possible.

Namie Amuro Official Website

Namie Amuro Wiki

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Namie’s stepfather survived the ordeal with minor injuries but Namie’s mother, unfortunately, did not. In memory of her mom’s death, Namie got a tattoo on her left arm above her son’s name tattoo, which reads: “June 30, 1950. My mother’s love lives with me eternally in my heart. R.I.P. March 17, 1999”. However, it seems like she has had those tattoos removed since then, perhaps because she has come to terms with her mother’s death, among other possible reasons relating to Japan and tattoos.

Despite this tragedy, Namie soon went back to her music and went on to release pop hits just like before. It is admirable how she could pick herself up and carry on making music for her fans. However, it was widely reported that Namie collapsed when she heard the news of this tragedy, and now struggles to talk about it or visit her hometown anymore.

Looking at her life, one can get a feel for the struggles Namie must have gone through during childhood and the sadness felt when her mother was killed in such a brutal way. Although these sorts of stories and scandals are perhaps more commonly exposed in media in the west, Japan is still a very traditional country and people are generally private and keep family scandals to themselves.

It could be concluded that Namie has been extremely brave and unique in Japan, by being open and honest about her story and not ashamed of it. One can hope that these tragedies will not be in vain, and may light the way for other artists and role models to prove that your family history is something not to be hidden away from but to be respected and reflected on, and certainly not judged.

News of Retiring

Namie Amuro shocked her fans by announcing that she will retire in September 2018. After such a successful career spanning nearly twenty-five years and with over 30 million albums and singles sold since her debut in 1995, she, her music, and her live performances will be sorely missed. Her news has also sparked a debate on who will sing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, since she was a popular candidate.

Namie Amuro Top Songs

Despite Namie Amuro’s adversities, she has managed to become one of the biggest Japanese female pop stars in history. She has been in the industry for nearly two and a half decades, not to mention that she still looks as young as she did 20 years ago. Her strength and perseverance is certainly commendable, and her fans will be sorry to see her go. We only hope that she is moving on to peace and happiness.

Namie Amuro Official Website

Namie Amuro’s official website *Japanese Only

Namie Amuro Official Website Free

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