Yumi Matsutoya

Yumi Matsutoya, nicknamed Yuming, is a Japanese singer, composer, lyricist and pianist. Matsutoya often writes both the lyrics and the music to her songs, and is renowned for her idiosyncratic voice and live performances. She is one of the most prominent figures in the history of Japanese popular music. Matsutoya's recording career has been commercially successful, with more than 42 million records sold. 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. 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 maiden name Yumi Arai. 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. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumi_Ma...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)