Sae Miyazawa Japanese Singer Born 1990 in Tokyo

Early life

Sae Miyazawa was born on 13 August 1990 in Tokyo. She grew up to become one of the better-known performers of the AKB48 family of idol groups, and later worked mainly as a stage and television actress. Her recordings were released on King Records and are classed as J-pop.

Career

Miyazawa first auditioned for AKB48 and was turned down. She tried again in February 2006, this time among roughly twelve thousand applicants, and was chosen as one of 19 girls for the newly formed Team K. The team made its stage debut on 1 April 2006, and she remained with Team K and AKB48 until August 2012. During those years she was featured on the title tracks of 25 of the group's first 27 singles. In October 2011 she was recorded as the AKB48 member with the most appearances on the NHK music programme Music Japan, with 34.

She also took part in two spin-off units. Chocolove from AKB48 was formed in 2007 as a trio with Sayaka Akimoto and Rina Nakanishi; it released two singles and an album before ending in 2008. Diva was announced in 2011, with Akimoto, Ayaka Umeda and Yuka Masuda, and was disbanded in late 2014 after a farewell single and album.

In August 2012 Miyazawa and fellow member Mariya Suzuki were sent abroad to help lead SNH48, the Shanghai-based sister group. Work visa problems kept them from performing at first, and both made their debut with the group on 11 October 2013. Japan's education ministry named her a representative of its "Tobitate! Ryugaku Japan" study-abroad campaign, citing her work in China. In 2014 she was moved to SKE48, based in Nagoya, where she was made leader of Team S while staying on as a concurrent member of SNH48. By the end of 2015 she had appeared on 32 AKB48 single A-sides.

During a televised music programme at the end of 2015 she announced that she would leave SKE48 and SNH48 in 2016. She left in March 2016 after farewell performances at the theatres of all three groups.

Alongside her group work, Miyazawa published two photobooks, "Kanojo" in 2009 and "Namida no Yukue" in 2015, and appeared in feature films, stage plays and television dramas. She is credited in the films Densen Uta (2007) and High School Debut (2011). On stage she took a major role in "Wings of Kuzariana" in 2014, played the male lead in a stage adaptation of the manga "AKB49: Ren'ai Kinshi Jōrei", and in 2016 played the main protagonist of the stage version of "Crest of the Royal Family", sharing the part with Seiko Niizuma. Later that year she worked with the group ARSMAGNA on a single and took a main role in the TV Asahi drama "Ossan's Love".

In July 2018 she ended her contract with Flave Entertainment and, a year later, signed with Horipro. In between she took a break from entertainment. From 2019 she worked regularly in musicals, and she appeared in the Japanese production of West Side Story as a double cast with the singer May J. In 2022 she was cast as Sawa Kaizaki in the TV Tokyo series Ultraman Decker, a role she repeated in the follow-up film Ultraman Decker Finale: Journey to Beyond.

Recognition

In the AKB48 general elections, in which fans vote to decide the line-up for a single, Miyazawa placed 14th in 2009, 9th in 2010, 11th in both 2011 and 2012, 10th in 2013, 12th in 2014 and 8th in 2015, her highest result. A song she led, "Kiseki wa Mani Awanai", ranked second in the fan-voted Request Hour concerts in January 2013 and took first place in the 2016 edition. Fans and the media often call her "Sae-chan". She and Sayaka Akimoto were known within Team K as the "Twin Towers" because of their height, and she was also described as the group's "handsome idol" for her boyish image. A character in the animated series AKB0048 was modelled on her.