It only takes seconds of an Ado performance to grasp the hold the Japanese singer has over her adoring fans in the crowd.
The 22-year-old singer — who actually refers to herself as an “Utaite,” a Japanese word for a typically amateur singer who uses an avatar to post song covers online — shot to the top of music charts in her home country when she was just a teenager. She’s performed at Japan’s National Stadium, which holds over 60,000 fans. Despite Ado’s overwhelming fame, even her biggest fan wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a crowd.
Ado, keeping in line with the cultural norm for Utaite singers, has never revealed her identity, instead using an anime character-like avatar online. In person, during one of her heart-pounding and thrilling concerts, the singer performs in the “Ado box” — a shadowed metal box on stage that allows her to perform live without being seen. Photos and videos are not allowed at her shows, making the atmosphere all about living in the moment.
Wrapping up her biggest world tour to date, Hibana, Sunday, Ado sees her global profile continue to grow. Below, the singer speaks with THR about why she doesn’t want to reveal her identity, how she felt before heading out on her first overseas tour, and bringing Japanese music and culture to the world.
Can you share a bit about your decision not to reveal your identity and why it’s important to you as an artist?
In Japan, I’m known as…well, I call myself a Utaite rather than an artist. There’s this culture in Japan that started from the Internet — there’s a video-sharing platform called Niconico where Vocaloid (a voice synthesizer software) songs are covered by Utaite as well. The people post videos, but not under their real names. They come up with a new nickname for themselves. They come up with a new sort of anime character design as an icon for themselves.
As a young child, I was very much drawn by the Vocaloid genre and the people as well. I had an inferiority complex in terms of how I looked, so when I found the culture, I realized that this was finally something that I could do. This is how my so-called mysterious career sort of evolved. I started with posting on the Internet and that has led to where I I’m now.
You started quite young. Do you feel that not showing your identity and being able to perform in a “mysterious” way, as you put it, has been different for you as a woman? In the entertainment industry, particularly, younger women are often forced into a box.
That’s actually something I’ve never thought about, really. But now that you’ve mentioned it, it does ring true. In the Utaite world, there are male and female singe