Kotoko Japanese Singer From Sapporo

Early life

Kotoko is a Japanese singer, songwriter and musician, usually written in capitals as KOTOKO. She was born on 19 January 1980 in Sapporo, on the island of Hokkaido. Beginning in elementary school she believed her voice would shape her future, and she entered as many auditions as she could. Besides her regular schooling she took classes at the music school Haura to develop her singing.

Career

She became a professional singer in 2000 after a successful audition with I've Sound, a team of producers who work with a range of female vocalists and are best known for the music of dating simulation and adult computer games. That year she released her first mini-album, Sora o Tobetara. Many of its tracks were recorded again for Hane, issued in 2004 and treated as her first official album. Her earliest appearance on an I've Sound disc was on the release Dear Feeling, sold at Comiket 59 alongside the singer Aki, and she later contributed to Disintegration, a compilation of the label's vocalists. Through these releases she began performing opening and ending themes for anime.

From 2004 to 2010 she was signed to the Rondorobe label, which released her albums Hane, Garasu no Kaze (June 2005), Uzu-Maki (2006) and Epsilon no Fune (2009). Her second album, Garasu no Kaze, drew praise in several online fan communities. In October 2005 she put out a maxi single that included "421: A Will" from that album, with "Shusou" as its B-side. In 2005 she also made her first official appearance in North America with a concert at Anime Expo, which was followed by the Kotoko Lax Tour.

In 2009 she wrote "Screw" for the live-action film Assault Girls, directed by Mamoru Oshii. Her song "Ao (Iconoclast)" was used as the opening theme for the console version of the video game BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, and "Hekira no Sora e Izanaedo" opened the sequel, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift. Her 2009 singles also include "Snipe" and "daily-daily Dream", and the compilation Anime's Compilation Best came out that year.

She signed with Warner Home Video in 2011 and stayed until 2018. Her seventeenth single, "Light My Fire", was written by Ryo of Supercell and served as the first opening theme of the 2011 anime series Shakugan no Shana Final. That year also brought the album Hiraku Uchu Pocket. The singles "Unfinished" and "Restart" followed in 2012, and Kuchuu Puzzle, an album, in 2013, with "Tough Intention" as a single in 2014. She attended the Animazement convention in 2012 and again in 2014. She worked with the band Altima on "Plasmic Fire", used in the film Accel World: Infinite Burst, and with Luna Haruna on "SxW (Soul World)", the theme of a video game called Accel World VS Sword Art Online: Millennium Twilight.

In February 2018 she announced a return to Geneon, now known as NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan, and she is currently signed to that company. Her albums since then are Tears Cyclone: Kai (2018), Tears Cyclone: Sei (2019) and Sweet Cyclone: Yay (2022). In 2020 two collections were released, a compilation of her anime songs titled The Fable and a box of her game songs called The Bible.

Her songs have appeared in many other anime and game titles, among them Please Teacher!, Maria-sama ga Miteru, Hourglass of Summer, Hayate the Combat Butler, Kannazuki no Miko, Shakugan no Shana, To Love-Ru, Phantasy Star Online, Argevollen and Baldr Sky. She writes music and lyrics, both for her own recordings and for other vocalists in I've Sound.