Miyuki Nakajima

The singer/songwriter Miyuki Nakajima can be described as the female Japanese equivalent of Bob Dylan. She's a bit younger than Dylan, and her guitar-based, intelligent, and wordy folk songs are heavier on melancholy than social issues, but she's also enjoyed a long career and plays a similarly important role in Japanese popular music and the country's modern culture in general: suffice to say, she's the only musician to be included in the National Language Council of Japan in the ‘90s. She's not just acclaimed, but commercially successful, too: most of her 30-plus albums charted in the Top Ten, her sales by the mid-2000s totaled over 21 million units, and that's not counting over 90 songs she wrote for other artists, and numerous covers of her works performed throughout East Asia. ~ Alexey Eremenko