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Yuna Ito Biography

Yuna Ito (伊藤由奈) was born in Hawaii (USA) on September 20th of 1983. When Yuna was in elementary school, she loved to sing along with Janet Jackson & Mariah Carey songs, and she could already sing in the seven different octaves even though she was still young. After graduating high school in Hawaii, Yuna returned to Japan, the home country of her father and started taking singing lessons.

In early 2005, auditions started for the Nana movie, and Yuna also auditioned and eventually got the part of charismatic TRAPNEST vocalist Serizawa Reira. However, in order to create a hype about her debut as an actress and as a singer, Sony wanted to keep everything a secret and Yuna was never present at any of the Nana press conferences. One of Japan’s top artists, Mika Nakashima was cast as Oosaki Nana in the same movie. Mika was already an accomplished pop artist and actress with much more experience than Yuna, so the two made a prefect contrast since Reira in the Nana comic is the complete opposite of Oosaki Nana. Of course, since Nana is a movie about two opposing rock bands, there would have to be lots of music. Mika, representing the group BLACK STONES, would release her GLAMOROUS SKY single as the theme song for the movie, where as Yuna, representing TRAPNEST, would sing ENDLESS STORY, a song used for one of the important scenes in the movie. In order to avoid any conflict of interest between TRAPNEST and BLACK STONES fans, the songs, CD covers and music videos for the two songs were completely opposite. GLAMOROUS SKY is a punk song with a cool black cover, whereas ENDLESS STORY is a ballad with a girlish pink cover. GLAMOROUS SKY was set to be released on August 31st, and ENDLESS STORY on September 7th, so that they would not have to compete for the charts in the same week.

Yuna’s first press conference with Mika was on August 31st at the Harajuku Quest Hal where a preview party for the Nana movie was taking place. Both Yuna and Mika performed their songs in front of the press and fans. Since then Yuna has performed her ENDLESS STORY many times on programs such as Music Station, Pop Jam, etc. ENDLESS STORY’s highest position in the charts was 2 for the weekly chart, and 1 for several daily charts. The single is currenly enjoying its 13th week in the charts, having sold over 400,000 copies. She won the best new artist award of 2005 for the Best Hit Song Festival, and ENDLESS STORY was also voted by Oricon-style readers as the Nr.1 Love Song of 2005. The success of ENDLESS STORY has been tremendous and bodes well for the future of her career.