Kuraki, Mai

Mai Kuraki, (born October 28, 1982 in Funabashi, Chiba) is a Japanese pop singer-songwriter She was influenced at an early age by Whitney Houston's singing and Michael Jackson's dancing. In her second year of junior high school, she submitted a demo tape to the Giza Studio recording label and won a contract. She debuted in the United States in 1999 with the song "Baby I Like," released as Mai K. Her first Japanese single, "Love, Day After Tomorrow", was released later in the year. It sold 1,385,190 copies in Japan. The success of her debut was quickly followed by her second single "Stay by my side" which become her first no.1 single and eventually sold 922,140 copies. Mai's third single "Secret of my Heart" was also very successful reaching no.2 on the Oricon Weekly Ranking (At this week, Masaharu Fukuyama's biggest hit single "Sakurasaka" was number 1, which sold 2,299,000 copies). The single charted for sixteen weeks and sold 968,980 copies. A few weeks before the release of her debut album Mai released her fourth single "Never Gonna Give You Up" featuring Michael Africk. The single peaked at #2 and sold 434,250 copies Year 2002 was a year of success for Mai Kuraki. January that year, "Winter Bells", the 10th opening theme for the popular anime Detective Conan, reached the top position of the Oricon charts. FT Shiseido chose "Feel fine!" as the theme song for its 100 year celebration campaign. The single release of the song briefly held the daily top spot against Ayumi Hamasaki's "Free & Easy", but lost out the weekly top spot. (Source: Wikipedia)