is a Japanese singer. She publishes her music under the Motorod label, a division of Avex Group. Biography Early life Nanase Aikawa was born on February 16, 1975, in Osaka, Japan. Throughout her school years, Nanase had sung and participated in several singing competitions. When Aikawa auditioned for Sony Music Entertainment at the age of 15, she failed, but met a well-known music producer Tetsuro Oda. At the age of 17, she dropped out of school, and she contacted Oda to be trained by him. At the age of 20 she released her first single, Yume Miru Shoujo ja Irarenai on November 8, 1995. Career After she released her first single on November 8, 1995, she released three more singles, and then her first full album Red in 1996, which sold more than two million copies in its first month. That album won her an invitation to perform on Kōhaku Uta Gassen, a New Year's Eve singing contest between male and female teams of popular singers sponsored by NHK (one of Japan's television networks). Since then, she has released about one album each year, plus an average of three mini- or maxi-singles. Her second album, Paradox, was released in July 1997, selling 1.8 million copies, coinciding with her first concert tour Live Emotion '97 (consisting of 20 concert dates, and attracting a total of 65,000 fans, according to Avex). July 1998 saw her third album Crimson, and another concert tour with over 40 concert dates. Her 1999 release, I.D. was a compilation album, but it debuted at number one on the rock chart, her fourth consecutive album to be released at the number one slot. Some music-journalists said that a large part of her fan base, during the 1990s, was the Bōsōzoku (motorcycle gang) youthes especially those in the western areas of Japan. In 2001, she also released a 'mini-album' (sometime between a full album and a single) with only 7 tracks called the Last Quarter of uncharacteristically soft ballad-style music, recorded during her later months of pregnancy. It was not until 2003 that she released another album, another compilation, called ID: 2. At the 11th Annual Japan Gold Disc Awards, Nanase's album Red was voted the Best Album (Japanese Rock and Folk music, female vocalist category). Her album Paradox was also voted Best Album of the Year at the 12th Annual Japan Gold Disc Awards. In February 2004, three