camera. She replied that she wanted to make sure that the Zard project would in fact succeed first. In the other six interviews, Sakai expresses shyness on camera. In fact, a staff member revealed that when Sakai saw so many people lining up for her concert tour in 2004, she was taken aback and hid herself. After some effort, she was able to walk up to the crowd and thank them for coming. However, her shyness did not reflect an inability to work well with others. It has been noted that after she had gone home early one day she arranged for food to be sent to her staff at her office who were working late into the evening. Professional career For the next two years following her scouting, she was a Toei "karaoke queen" and a promotional model appearing in television commercials for Japan Air System. The following year Sakai was a Nissin race queen. In 1990, Daiko Nagato, a music producer for Being Corporation, noted her potential as a singer-songwriter. Through this connection, she created a Being subsidiary called Sensui (same Kanji characters as Izumi) and started her career taking the name Izumi Sakai. In addition to taking a new name, Sakai revised her year of birth from 1967 to 1969. In 1991, Sakai joined the five-member pop group Zard as lead vocalist. The group name did not have any particular meaning except Sakai felt that word Zard sounded like a rock group. She also took the name as derived from words such as "blizzard" and "wizard." The group's name very quickly became synonymous with Sakai herself, and Sakai wrote the lyrics to all of Zard's songs except Onna de Itai and Koionna no Yuuutsu, both of which were written by Daria Kawashima. By 1993, the four male band members left the group but Sakai chose to keep the Zard name throughout her career. Izumi Sakai was Zard's sole member at the time of the band's debut, although between late 1991 and early 1993 four other members were introduced. The melodies of early Zard hits were written by prominent Japanese composers, most notably Seiichirō Kuribayashi and Tetsurō Oda. Izumi Sakai wrote nearly all of the lyrics to Zard songs, totalling over one hundred fifty. A veteran recording producer described that while most artists communicate through the transparent glass in the recording studio, Sakai preferred covering the glass with