Hitomi Shimatani
| Hitomi Shimatani 島谷 ひとみ |
|
|---|---|
| Birth name | 島谷 瞳 (Shimatani Hitomi?) |
| Born |
September 4, 1980 Kure, Hiroshima, Japan |
| Genres | |
| Years active | 1999–present |
| Labels | Avex Trax |
| Website | Official Website |
Hitomi Shimatani (島谷ひとみ Shimatani Hitomi?, born 4 September 1980) is a Japanese pop singer signed to the Avex Trax label.
Shimatani started her career as an Enka singer with the release of her debut single "Ōsaka no Onna" (大阪の女 Ōsakan Woman?) in 1999, but later decided to get into the dance/pop style for her music. Shimatani's music has also appeared in video games and also anime series.
At the age of seventeen, while still in high school, Shimatani attended "The Japan Audition 1997", where she was chosen as the winner out of around 200,000 people and got a recording contract with the Avex label. After this she continued her studies in high school in Hiroshima, although she started to take vocal lessons in Tokyo during the weekends. She graduated from Shimizugaoka High School.
Her first single, entitled "Ōsaka no Onna" which was an enka song, was released in 1999 on the Avex Trax label. The single went to the top of the Oricon's Enka charts and much critical acclaim, but failed to chart within the Top 40 of the mainstream charts, selling rather poorly. "Ōsaka no Onna" became then Shimatani's only enka single, as since her second one, "Kaihōku", she turned into more mainstream pop influences.
Mainstream success did not come until 2001 with the release of Shimatani's third single, "Papillon", a Japanese version of Janet Jackson's song "Doesn't Really Matter". The single became her first Top 15 single in the Oricon charts, and eventually stayed within the Top 50 for twenty weeks, selling over 200,000 copies. Her sixth single "Shanty", which was used as theme song of TBS' TV drama Pretty Girls, became her first Top 10 single in the Japanese charts, peaking at number seven. In May 2002 she released another cover, this time of "Amairo no Kami no Otome" by the 60's group sounds band Village Singers. The song became a massive success, peaking at number 4 and leading to a "boom of covers" in Japan. It also became one of the most preferred songs to be sung in karaokes by Japanese people (it stayed at the top position of the Oricon Karaoke charts for 18 weeks, and it took the first position of its yearly charts). At the end of this successful year, Shimatani was invited for the first time to the most important Japanese TV show of New Years' Eve, the Kōhaku Uta Gassen on the NHK channel. From this time she would be invited to be in the show for another 3 years in a row.
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Wikipedia