Hikaru Utada is staring dead ahead. Sitting in a swivel chair in an identikit wood-wall office, the twenty-year-old Manhattan native is surrounded by older men and women in business suits. To her left, the chairmen of media conglomerates stage genial smiles; to the right, her mother and father face a photographer, smiling goofily. The oversized swivel chair, the presence of the suits, the pen raised in her right hand: all staging for a photo op. It’s Wednesday, March 20 in 2002, the year she signs a record contract with Island Def Jam.
She says little, but offers a diplomatic response to the Billboard journalist in the room as to whether she can crack the American market. Everyone smiles for the camera except for her. She looks daunted, realisation setting in. She has made a couple of records in New York before, but those were far smaller affairs. The pressure is on.
Except it was a little more complicated than the press-op photo, printed in Billboard, seemed. Her first album, a one-off for a New York indie label, was released when she was ten years old. At age fourteen, she moved to Japan; two years later, as Utada Hikaru, she was a pop star. Her 1999 Japanese-language debut First Love is the best selling Japanese pop album ever, going platinum thirty-two times; her follow-up Distance shifted three million copies in its first week. She has sold fifty-two million records, thirty-eight million of those in Japan alone. She had already worked with Jerkins; her introduction to the American market would be via the The Neptunes, Foxy Brown and the Rush Hour 2 soundtrack. Brown boasts “My girl sell units like Michael in the Eighties!” on that soundtrack’s "Blow My Whistle" and she isn’t far off the mark.
FEMM's album is so AMAZING! I am not worthy J-Pop album of the year
Probably my #2 album of this year behind J.Lo's 'A.K.A.' (yes, I'm a stan don't judge me). & to my surprise almost all of the songs on FEMM's album were released as singles + have PV's. Kinda glad I didn't know about them until "Whiplash" cause all the songs sound brand new to me. "Fxxk Boyz Get Money" is my new anthem
J-Pop album of the year 
