Hibari Misora


Hibari Misora was a Japanese singer, actress and cultural icon. She received a Medal of Honor for her contributions to music and for improving the welfare of the public, and was the first woman to receive the People's Honour Award which was conferred posthumously for giving the public hope and encouragement after World War II.
Misora recorded a total of 1,200 songs, and sold 68 million records. After she died, consumer demand for her recordings grew significantly, and by 2001, she had sold more than 80 million records. Her swan-song "Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni" is often performed by numerous artists and orchestras as a tribute to her, including notable renditions by The Three Tenors, Teresa Teng, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan and Kim Yeon-Ja.
Each year there is a special on Japanese television and radio featuring her songs. A memorial concert for Misora was held at the Tokyo Dome on November 11, 2012. It featured numerous musicians such as Ai, Koda Kumi, Ken Hirai, Kiyoshi Hikawa, Exile, AKB48 and Nobuyasu Okabayashi amongst others, paying tribute by singing her most famous songs.

Biography

Life and career

Misora was born Kazue Katō in Isogo-ku, Yokohama, Japan. Her father was Masukichi Katō, a fishmonger, and her mother Kimie Katō, a housewife. Misora displayed musical talent from an early age after singing for her father at a World War II send-off party in 1943. He invested a small fortune taken from the family's savings to begin a musical career for his daughter. In 1945 she debuted at a concert hall in Yokohama, at the age of eight. At the same time, she changed her last name, Katō, to Misora, at the suggestion of her mother. A year later, she appeared on a NHK broadcast, and impressed the Japanese composer Masao Koga with her singing ability. He considered her to be a prodigy with the courage, understanding, and emotional maturity of an adult. In the following two years, she became an accomplished singer and was touring notable concert halls to sold-out crowds.
Her recording career began, aged 12, in 1949. She changed her stage name to Hibari Misora, which means "lark in the beautiful sky," and starred in the film Nodojiman-kyō jidai. The film gained her nationwide recognition. She recorded her first single Kappa Boogie-Woogie for Columbia Records later that year. It became a commercial hit, selling more than 450,000 copies. She subsequently recorded "Kanashiki kuchibue", which was featured on a radio program and was a national hit. As an actress, she starred in around 160 movies from 1949 until 1971, and won numerous awards. Her performance in Tokyo Kid, in which she played a street orphan, made her symbolic of both the hardship and the national optimism of post-World War II Japan.
On January 13, 1957, Misora was attacked with hydrochloric acid, and injured in Asakusa International Theater. The attacker was described as an overly enthusiastic fan of hers.
In 1962, Misora married actor Akira Kobayashi. They divorced in 1964.
In 1973 Tetsuya Katō, Misora's brother, was prosecuted for gang-related activity. Although NHK did not acknowledge any connection, Misora was excluded from Kōhaku Uta Gassen for the first time in 18 years. She then refused to appear on NHK for years afterwards.
In 1978, she adopted a 7-year-old boy, Kazuya Kato.

Illness and death

In April 1987, on her way to a performance in Fukuoka, Misora suddenly collapsed. She was rushed to a hospital in Fukuoka, where she was diagnosed with avascular necrosis brought on by chronic hepatitis. She eventually showed signs of recovery in August. Misora commenced recording a new song in October, and in April 1988 performed at her comeback concert at Tokyo Dome.
Misora died from pneumonia on June 24, 1989, aged 52, at a hospital in Tokyo. Her death was widely mourned throughout Japan.
Beginning in 1990, television and radio stations annually play her song "Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni" on her birth-date to show respect. In a national poll by NHK in 1997, the song was voted the greatest Japanese song of all time by more than 10 million people.

Museum

In 1994, the Hibari Misora Museum opened in Arashiyama, Kyoto. This multistorey building traced the history of Misora's life and career in multi-media exhibits, and displayed various memorabilia. It attracted more than 5 million visitors, until its closedown on November 30, 2006, as to allow a scheduled reconstruction of the building. The main exhibits were moved into the Shōwa period section of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, until reconstruction was complete. The new Hibari Misora Theater opened on April 26, 2008, and includes a CD for sale of a previously unreleased song.
A bronze statue of her debut was built as a memorial in Yokohama in 2002, and attracts around 300,000 visitors each year.

Monuments

A monument depicting Hibari's portrait with an inscribed poem was erected in her memory near Sugi no Osugi in Ōtoyo, Kōchi. In 1947 Hibari Misora, at the age of 10 years, was involved in a traffic accident in Ōtoyo, Kōchi. While recovering from injuries she stayed in the town and reportedly visited Sugi no Osugi and wished to become a famous singer. She returned to Tokyo, where her recording career began in 1949.

Portrayals in media

After Hibari's death in 1989, a TBS television drama special aired in the same year by the name of The Hibari Misora Story, where Misora was portrayed by Kayoko Kishimoto.
Her voice became focused on in September 2019, after it was used for a version of the Vocaloid engine known as "VOCALOID:AI", which tried to recreate her singing vocals. The performance also used a full 3D rendering of the singer.

Question of Korean ancestry

Hibari Misora's ancestry has been a matter of dispute. There are assertions that she was of ethnic Korean ancestry, and that she and her family held Korean passports. This claim spread around widely. After her death in 1989, author Rō Takenaka and journalist Tsukasa Yoshida investigated Misora's background, confirming that she was not Korean, but Japanese.

Notable songs

Hibari Misora appeared in 166 films:

1940s

Her songs also appeared in 5 Japanese films: