Satoko Ishimine

Satoko Ishimine was born the third girl of three sisters in Naha City, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. Her family loved listening to such legendary foreign musicians as The Carpenters and The Beatles. She started dreaming of becoming a professional singer when she was ten-year-old.[1]

Through the initiating years of her career, Ishimine established her popularity for the public as an Okinawan singer, especially due to the hit of her third single Hana. Nevertheless, she did not want to be regarded as such a matured vocalist with modest and magnificent songs as people liked her to perform those days.[2] After five years since the debut, she started writing lyrics as she strongly desired to express herself with her own words. Around 2000, she began to play acoustic guitars to build her own style of an independent musical performer within herself.

In January 2001, Ishimine released her last original album for Toshiba EMI Closet, in which she was committed to writing the lyrics of more than a half of the entire songs. In 2003, she ended the contract with EMI and transferred her label to PRHYTHM. The first album for the new label Bloomy Balloon was one of the most motivated records in her career that she produced all the lyrics and most of the melodies for all the tracks. She cooperated in the whole creation of the album with the male guitarist and composer Hikaru Ishizaki, who resulted in getting married with Ishimine in March 2006.

After the ten years since she encountered her first spouse and the seven years of their marriage, Ishimine announced that she divorced Ishizaki in May 2013. Eventually for the first time in ten years, she released three songs on iTunes in the end of June.[3] With the help of a musical director Ayami Matsuo,[4] Ishimine produced the first cover album in her career that contains no original songs, which was released for the label Tokuma Japan in September 2014.