Yumi Matsutoya

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Yumi Matsutoya" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (June 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. (September 2014) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Japanese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:松任谷由実]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ja|松任谷由実}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Yumi Matsutoya
Matsutoya in 1989
Background information
Birth name	Yumi Arai
Also known as	Yuming, Yumi Arai, Karuho Kureta
Born	(1954-01-19) January 19, 1954 (age 70) Hachiōji, Tokyo, Japan
Origin	Hachiōji, Tokyo, Japan
Genres	Pop rock jazz fusion folk rock kayōkyoku city pop
Occupations	Singer songwriter radio personality
Instrument(s)	Vocals, piano
Years active	1968–present
Labels	Express Alfa Capitol EMI
Website	yuming.co.jp

Yumi Matsutoya (松任谷 由実, Matsutōya Yumi, born January 19, 1954), nicknamed Yuming (ユーミン, Yūmin),^[1] is a Japanese singer, composer, lyricist and pianist. Generally the writer of both the lyrics and the music in her songs,^[2] she is renowned for her idiosyncratic voice and live performances, and is one of the most prominent figures in the history of Japanese popular music.^[3]

Her recording career has been commercially successful with more than 42 million records sold.^[4] In 1990, her album The Gates of Heaven became the first album to be certified "2x million" by the RIAJ,^[5] and she has had twenty-one No. 1 albums listed on the Oricon charts.^[4] She is the only artist to have at least one number-one album every year on the Oricon charts for 18 consecutive years.^[6]

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 birth name Yumi Arai (荒井 由実, Arai Yumi). 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. Other famous songs include "Haru-yo, Koi" and "Sweet, Bitter Sweet".

She also uses the name Kureta Karuho (呉田軽穂), which is derived from the Swedish film star Greta Garbo, when offering her work to other musicians. ^[7]

In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture, it is written that "Yuming incorporated influences from progressive rock and European pop to produce a sophisticated, upper-middle-class female Japanese voice and sound in a contemporary musical and journalistic world dominated by discussions of folk music and social critique. This musical idiom is generally thought to have been first realised on [...] Cobalt Hour".^[8] The album The 14th Moon and the three albums that ranked in the top 10 of the Japanese charts in 1976 (Cobalt Hour, Yuming Brand, and Hikōki-gumo) "contained several songs which are considered to be early classics of the J-pop genre."^[9]

After marrying her musical collaborator Masataka Matsutoya in 1976, Arai began recording under her married name and has continued to do so. Throughout the 1980s, Matsutoya's music was prominently featured in advertisements for Mitsubishi Motors in her native Japan and her image was used to promote their vehicles. In addition to multiple hit singles, she has obtained enormous commercial success on the Japanese Albums Chart, particularly during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.

The magazine Shūkan Gendai ranked Matsutoya third (behind only Miyuki Nakajima and Masayoshi Son) in a list of the smartest Japanese figures that was determined based on the criteria of "intelligence, determination, sensibility and capability".^[10]