Cocco Japanese Singer From Naha

Early life

Cocco, whose birth name is Makishi Satoko, was born on 19 January 1977 in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, Japan. She attended Kaiho High School. As a teenager she hoped to become a professional ballet dancer and went to many ballet auditions. To pay for the trip to one of them in Tokyo, she also entered singing auditions. The ballet audition did not lead anywhere, but the judges at the singing audition took notice of her, and Victor Entertainment later signed her.

Career

Cocco made her recording debut on an independent label in November 1996 under the spelling "Cocko", with a self-titled EP. One of its tracks, "Sing a Song No Music, No Life", was used in an advertising campaign for Tower Records Japan. In March 1997 she changed the spelling of her stage name to Cocco and released her major-label debut single, "Countdown", followed shortly by a full-length album. Her commercial breakthrough came in 1998 with "Tsuyoku Hakanaimonotachi", which sold more than 250,000 copies. That year she also issued the single "Raining" and the album Kumuiuta. Further albums followed with Rapunzel in 2000 and Sangurōzu in 2001.

Before Sangurōzu came out she announced that she was leaving the music business. Her label put out a retrospective, Best + Ura Best + Mihappyōkyokushū, later in 2001, which gathered singles, some B-sides and five previously unreleased tracks. The break was short. In 2002 she published her first art book, Minami no Shima no Hoshi no Suna. In August 2003 she organised a benefit concert to draw attention to beach clean-up work in Okinawa, and a documentary DVD, Heaven's Hell, appeared that December.

In 2004 she contributed to the Yutaka Ozaki tribute album BLUE and published a second book, Minami no Shima no Koi no Uta, which came with a limited-edition single, "Garnet/Celeste Blue". The following year she collaborated with the photographer and singer Nanaco on The Bird, a combined CD and book. In late 2004 she worked with Shigeru Kishida of the rock band Quruli to record a new version of "Sing a Song" for the 25th anniversary of Tower Records in Japan. Those sessions led to the formation of Singer Songer, a five-piece band that also includes Quruli's bassist Masashi Sato, the keyboardist Hirohisa Horie and the drummer Dai Taro. The band made its live debut at Quruli's year-end concert in December 2004, released the single "Shoka Rinrin" in May 2005 and the album Barairo Pop in June 2005, a collection with a country-influenced sound.

In April 2006 she wrote a series of essays for the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, and she has continued to write for newspapers and magazines since then. She performed in July 2007 at the Japanese leg of Live Earth at Makuhari Messe in Chiba. After the album Kira Kira she lived in the United Kingdom for a time and studied photography at college.

Her first long novel, Polomerria, was published in 2010. That year she appeared at the World Happiness rock festival in Tokyo in August and released Emerald, her first self-produced album, on 11 August. She also provided the theme song "Yagi no Sanpo" for the debut feature film of the fourteen-year-old director Ryugo Nakamura. A single titled "Nirai Kanai" is also dated to 2010 in the records used for this site.

In 2011 she made her acting debut in Kotoko, directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, in which she starred and was also responsible for art direction and music; the film lists her as a writer as well. Her second screen credit is the 2016 film A Bride For Rip Van Winkle. In June 2018 she covered "Good Bye" for the hide tribute album Tribute Impulse. Her listed genres are J-pop and grunge, and she is credited with Victor Entertainment as a label.

Public roles

Cocco is the lead singer of Singer Songer. Before the band took shape, her work with Shigeru Kishida went by the name Cocco-chan to Shigeru-kun, a prototype of the group with the same line-up. Her YouTube channel had 237,000 subscribers in September 2025.