Beginnings
Like most teen idols, her J-pop career was spectacular but short. In 1989, at the advanced age of 22, she made an attempt to revive her flagging career and attain "street cred" by forming an edgy girl group called "Minako with Wild Cats". This effort was unsuccessful, and it seemed that she would fade into obscurity.
By 1992, however, she had reinvented herself. She took formal acting and singing lessons, and became a notable theatrical singer and actress. In auditions for the Tokyo production of Miss Saigon, she won out over 12,000 other candidates for the part of Kim, earning the nickname "Tokyo's Miss Saigon". She also appeared in numerous other theatrical performances.
Towards the end of her life, she released several classical albums demonstrating her soprano singing voice, including religious works such as Amazing Grace and Ave Maria. She also sang theme songs for several anime programs.
She did not abandon pop music in her adult career; indeed, she became recognized for her vocal improvement in the adult pop genre. Her song "Tsubasa" (Wings) is famous for the "long note" that she holds for 30 seconds.
Her career was cut short by leukemia. After she became ill in late 2004, she served as a celebrity spokesperson for the Live for Life Project, a campaign for the treatment of leukemia. At that time, she also changed her name to add a dot after the end of her name (本田美奈子．in kanji), thus increasing the number of strokes to 31. In Japanese "uranai" (占い) fortune-telling, a person's fate is associated with the number of strokes in the name. Following a severe misfortune, many Japanese change their name to change their fortune. As a result, albums released after 2004 show her name as "本田美奈子．" in kanji and/or "Honda Minako." in romanization.
Since her death, numerous posthumous albums and videos have been released, including some previously-unreleased songs.
Read more about this topic: Minako Honda
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“The beginnings of altruism can be seen in children as early as the age of two. How then can we be so concerned that they count by the age of three, read by four, and walk with their hands across the overhead parallel bars by five, and not be concerned that they act with kindness to others?”
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“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
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“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)