Nagayama Yōko(長山洋子)

Nagayama Yōko(長山洋子) made her debut in 1984 as an idol singer and started performing enka songs in 1993. She is also a master Tsugaru-jamisen player.

When she was 4 years old, she followed her father to a minyō lesson, and she also started to take these lessons. At the encouragement of her minyō teacher, she also started to learn how to play shamisen when she was 10 years old.

When she was 16 years old, she was scheduled to make a debut as an enka singer, but the production studio decided that she was too young to make a debut as an enka singer. As a result, she made her debut as an idol singer with the song "Spring is SA-RA SA-RA(春はSA-RA SA-RA Haru wa SA-RA SA-RA)."

She struggled with the popularity until 1986 when she recorded and released "I Want to Ride on a Cloud (雲にのりたい Kumoni Noritai)" originally sung by Mayuzumi Jun(黛ジュン) in May  (#35 on the Oricon charts) and "Venus (ヴィーナス Vīnasu)" by The Shocking Blue in October (#10 on the Oricon charts).

She has appeared on Kōhaku Utagassen fourteen times, in 1993 and from 1995 to 2007.

This blog post translates information from the Wikipedia article 長山洋子 which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.