Yuna Ito

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:24 am Post subject: Yuna Ito Post Rating: 0

hey guys!!!
i know yuna is not an actress but o well i'm posting her thread here anways.
so how many of u like her and her music???
i think she's an amazing singer. she's the best by far out of any other singer in japan.
i like her personality too. she's really sweet and mature.
her song "precious" is my favorite song by yuna.
she also did a duet with celine dion which was pretty cool
anyways, lets make this thread fun!!!

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:41 am Post subject: Post Rating: 0

I voted no, there are many talented singers in Japan that are better but it isn't really fair to compare them.

Technically, Yuna is an actress. She was Reira in the movie NANA and in NANA 2.

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 4:55 pm Post subject: Post Rating: 0

Yuna Ito is a fantastic singer, but I don't think she's the best. Most of the talented female vocalists I've come across are actually quite unknown. People like Emyli, Aya Kamiki, Yoshika, or Thelma Aoyama before her latest single that hit number one. I was very happy for her because of her collaboration with Celine Dion, however, and I think her voice is very sweet and unique.

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 5:49 pm Post subject: Post Rating: 0

I wouldn't say that Yuna is the best singer, or anyone else for that matter. But I would say that Yuna is a unique singer in that in Japanese pop culture, she has a major advantage in two areas:

1. Many Japanese appreciate the fact that Yuna is a native English speaker. It is rare in the geinokai for an artist to speak and sing in his/her native English tongue. Just that alone makes her stick out. The Japanese are very conscience of how they speak in English, and like listening to a native speaker like Yuna. BTW, this is more likely the reason she was given the part of Reira since (at least from what I've been told) Reira is also an English speaker in the manga.

2. Much of Japanese pop today is R&B. But from a Japanese resident perspective, listening to foreign R&B singers from America is quite different from an American native listing to artists like Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera. The ONLY artists I've seen that come close to sounding like American R&B are BoA and Yuna. All the others like Hamasaki Ayumi sound pseudo-R&B; it is R&B, but still not quite. And I think the Japanese are picking up on this as well.

Yuna's good. But no one is the best at singing. Singing is an art form. Singing isn't like Tiger Woods and golf.

--- groink

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 7:02 pm Post subject: Post Rating: 0

Know how Boa's head voice can sometimes make people wince because it's so piercing and loud? That's Yuna Ito through half of her ballads. Big Smile

Yuna may have the most powerful voice in all of J-pop, in the sense that it's literally louder than almost everybody else's. Put Dir En Grey behind her, and Yuna would still win! But even though her vocal tone is much praised for its clarity, she doesn't have enough vibrato in her tone to make that sheer volume anything but unpleasant. Her breath control is terrific; it doesn't look like she takes pauses to take in air between phrases, and she doesn't try to overextend her chest voice where her head voice will do.

As an artist, her vocal phrasing is Broadway, not R&B . She needs to work on singing around the beat and varying her tonality to play off the lyric rather than yell all over it. Ayaka has a monster voice, but her artistry is in her phrasing.