After more than 25 years in the industry, Crystal Kay is regarded as a pioneer of J-R&B and J-Pop. Now, about to embark on her first North American tour, she is just beginning to grapple with the meaning of her legacy.

*Crystal Kay photographed by Nagoshi Keisuke*

In May, Crystal Kay attended the Open Port festival in her hometown, Yokohama, Japan. Kay’s history with the festival, which celebrates the opening of Yokohama’s ports in 1859, runs deep: She’s performed there several times over the years and attends the festival annually. Kay is an important figure in Yokohama’s history too: This year Kay is celebrating over twenty-five years in the music industry as one of the first biracial J-Pop stars.

That night, as she meandered through a crowd of CEOs, high-profile city leadership and government officials, Kay learned a surprising bit of news. The American military base that she grew up on was going to be torn down soon. It had been over thirty years since she had left the base with her mother but the memories came flooding back. The gated community was insular: Kay attended an American school there and grew up surrounded by children who came from multicultural families like her own.

“It made me really sad,” Kay said, “because I wanted to see it one last time before it was torn down.”

History, particularly Kay’s own, has been a point of focus lately for the singer. It is only recently, she told me, that she has begun to contend with her legacy and the barriers she broke simply by being herself. Admittedly, Kay’s identity isn’t something that she thought about much as a teen star. But over the last decade, she has slowly begun to see how far her impact goes. In June, she announced her first tour of North America, which coincides with the release of her ALL TIME BEST 25th Anniversary compilation album, featuring nearly thirty tracks from her career.

Kay, together with BoA and Hikaru Utada, became the architects for modern J-Pop . Over the past two years, all three artists have grappled with their legacies and the music that shot them into superstardom by embarking on tours and albums that serve as retrospectives. BoA re-recorded and rearranged nearly all of her biggest hits, often to bittersweet results for her “best of” album. Utada stuck closer to the originals for their retrospective, SCIENCE FICTION, but her voice, now deeper and more soulful, emoted genuine loss on tracks like her debut single “First Love”. Kay, like Utada, chose to not veer far from the originals. But, she said, “There’s such a big difference between a teen me and an almost-forty-year-old me. I would make sure that I could keep that sweetness and innocence I have in those original recordings, while infusing the grown depth and experience I have now.”

When re-recording classic tracks like “Boyfriend - Part II” or “Koni Ochitara”, Kay could have easily overpowered the music and pushed for a more modern sound. But Kay wasn’t interested in improving the songs. The point, she explained, wasn’t to show that she could sing the song better now, even if she is arguably a more proficient singer.

Instead, the more songs she re-recorded and the longer Kay looked back at her career, the more she began to see, for the first time, who Crystal Kay really meant to fans – and to herself.

“I think as I’m offering my lived experiences with a richer voice, I’m honoring the song and lyrics as an older woman,” she reflected. “But I’m also honoring baby Crystal.”

There is perhaps no figure more influential on Crystal Kay than her mother. Long before I met Kay, I was fascinated by her mother’s unusual life story. I wondered how her resilience, eschewing the traditional path of Korean women, impacted Kay, a woman who also played against type.

So, I was eager to learn more when Kay’s mother appeared at the end of our interview. “I go by my stage name. You can call me Sincere. My Korean name is Soonhye,” she said by way of introduction. Her voice, I noticed, has an air of playfulness to it. “But I always felt like that name sounded unusual.”

Sincere, she said, suited her better.

Sincere never wanted to live a normal life. As a third generation Zainichi Korean she, like Kay, was born and raised in Japan. When she was in her twenties, she met and married Kay’s father, an African American man stationed in Japan. Kay was born shortly after. Sincere wasn’t interested in being strictly a stay at home mother, though. She wanted to be an entertainer and so, throughout Kay’s childhood, she would play in jazz clubs. Kay’s father, too, would often play bass, contributing to a household full of jazz, funk and R&B music.

Publicity photos from Sincere’s debut album

In 1994, Sincere signed with Victor Entertainment and released her debut album “THIS TIME”. It’s an album that Kay told me was “truly ahead of its time.” For a while she said, you could find videos of the music on YouTube. But the music never transferred to streaming platforms and when I mentioned that I’d try to find the album crate digging through LA’s Little Tokyo music shops, Kay and Sincere said that would likely be impossible. “It’s hard to find. I don’t even have a copy of the album,” Sincere said blithely.

“Mom is a hard worker,” Kay told me. “Everything she’s said she would do, she has manifested. She’s always been very focused.”

Kay remembers an idyllic child with her parents on the military base. She spent summers swimming with other neighborhood kids, attending BBQs and cookouts. Sometimes, families would host dance competitions or watermelon breaking contests for the children. It was a charming place, one that Kay intoned was hard to replicate outside of the gated community.

“It was almost like a Black Mirror episode,” she said and laughed. “It was like a utopia.”

When Kay was five, though, her mother and father separated. Kay’s memories of her father are vague beyond a few details: He could be charming and very gregarious. “Dad loved basketball and cars,” she said. But the details get fuzzy beyond these points. “I didn’t really live with him after we left the base,” she explained.

Instead, she and Sincere took off and became their own team. Saddled with the responsibilities of motherhood in a one-parent household, Sincere had to work hard to make a life for the pair. “I had to be strong,” Sincere remembered matter-of-factly. There was no other choice.

“I think a lot of things are starting to sink in now that I’m older and can understand it,” Kay told me. “I think she hid the harsh things from me as a child so I wouldn’t have to see the struggles.

One hardship, she told Korea Times, was that, for a long time, Sincere’s parents refused to have a close relationship with Kay, likely because of her race. But Sincere persevered. She continued to perform in clubs and on records. She was a dedicated, caring mom who became Kay’s closest confidant and critic. She cooked and took care of those around her. Growing up, friends would often tell Kay, “I wish I had your mom” and it was because Sincere made such an effort to sacrifice for others above herself.

Early on, Kay proved she had a knack for performing too, and so, when Sincere’s friend needed a child to perform for a jingle, they asked if they could borrow Kay. The jingle would be for a PC game console engine duo commercial and Kay killed it. “I think from then on, they were like, ‘Oh wow, Crystal’s good at this,’” she told me with a laugh. Soon, Kay began regularly booking commercials.

Her big break came when she performed jingles for All Nippon Airways and Vitamin Water. The song was “Eternal Memories” and it was written by the composer Yoko Kanno, who composed several famous compositions for anime. “Because I was a kid, I couldn’t really relate to it lyrically but the sound was beautiful and world class,” Kay told me. “I knew that – even as a young child.”

Her instincts were right: Soon, a lot of labels began to show interest. Sincere and Kay eventually chose to sign with Sony. “Eternal Memories” was slated as her debut and released in July 1999.

She was only twelve years old, and she would soon become a star.

From the jump, Kay was an anomaly in J-Pop, but she did share similarities with her closest contemporaries, BoA and Hikaru Utada. They were each teenagers thrust into the industry at a young age who became popular extraordinarily fast. They each were also outsiders. BoA, who is Korean, and Utada, who is Japanese American, both moved to Japan for work before they could even earn a driver’s license. And while Japan is home to Kay, she isn’t Japanese. She also didn’t look or sound like any other J-Pop star

In recent years, particularly in Western press, Kay’s identity has been a central focus of her story. But Kay long found the fascination with her identity peculiar. Maybe this is because she did her best to not stand out; to not draw more attention to herself than she already had as a celebrity and a biracial girl. Kay remembered this fascination with her identity going as far back as she can remember. As an example, she told me a story of when she was an infant and Sincere received a phone call from a local Yokohama reporter who was writing a story about their family. “It was very unusual,” Kay explained, for a Zainichi Korean woman to not just live in Japan but to marry a Black man. The story really took shape when she became a singer and had a biracial child.

When I asked how she saw herself as a teen after she became famous, Kay paused. “I don’t think I was considering my impact or my position as a mixed culture singer. Those kinds of things came after,” she stopped herself and let out a wicked laugh. “Actually,” she said and elongated the word’s syllables, “I think I’m able to look at it from a distance now.”

“I was literally a student, a basketball player, a marching band girl, a singer, and just full on, there was no time other than the weekends to work and promote as a singer,” she continued. “So my time was literally filled from the moment I woke up until I slept – and I barely slept.”

But she did find time to make some fantastic records. My favorite is 4 REAL, which has some of her freshest singles: “Boyfriend Part II (What Makes Me Fall in Love)”, “Candy” and “What Time Is It?”. The album is over twenty years old, but I see it as a map that future generations of Asian artists used to make their own R&B music.

Essential Crystal Kay albums: Almost Seventeen, 4REAL, 637 - always and forever, C.L.L. CRYSTAL LOVER LIGHT

Her breakthrough, though, was Almost Seventeen, released a year prior to 4 REAL. That album pushed Kay into stardom and was produced, largely, by Michico and T-Kura of Giant Swing Productions. The album reached #2 on the weekly Oricon album chart and sold 354,910 copies in a year, a stunning accomplishment for Kay.

Recently, while preparing for the tour, Kay pulled stems from one of Almost Seventeen’s most popular singles,“Girl U Love”. She was struck, listening over twenty years later, by how contemporary the music still sounded and how perfectly Michico and T-Kura arranged the track. When we think of Crystal Kay’s discography, it is often the tracks composed by Michiko and T-Kura, like “Ex-Boyfriend”, “What Time Is It?” or “Girls Night” that first comes to mind.

“They were the best pioneers. Nobody could do music like they were doing,” Kay told me passionately of their work. “I think they were the first Japanese people that could make tracks on the world-level. Michico is an amazing top-liner and lyricist. She was singing the demos,” Kay remembered. “She’d always be doing these crazy ass riffs and pushing the boundaries. So, I was very determined to do that as well.”

When I asked Kay to name a time when she felt like the magic clicked in the studio, she pointed to her very first album, C.L.L. Crystal Lover Light, which Michico and T-Kura were heavily involved in. “I trusted that team and I think they did an amazing job. Everyone was on their shit. Everything was very, very rich and well produced, “ she said. “That’s the blueprint of Crystal Kay. And since then it’s been hard to find people that can do that.”

Today, Crystal Kay is labeled as a J-Pop singer. She is often, rightly, called a pioneer of the genre. But if we’re splitting hairs then I would argue that Kay is actually an institution of J-R&B. There was no one making music like her in Japan in the 2000s. Show me another Asian artist who can lay down the vocals and sonics heard on a track like “Candy” or “Not Alone”. Name me another Asian artist from that time period who pulled from her scholarship of American R&B and her history of growing up in jazz clubs. Kay was, and is, an R&B singer before she was a J-Pop star.

For the first several years of Kay’s career, her music could stand on its own next to American artists like Amerie (also half-Black and half-Korean), Blu Cantrell, or Destiny’s Child. Yet looking back, Kay told me, Japanese producers often didn’t know how to handle her or the Black side of her culture.

“A lot of times, and still to this day, I didn’t have a director,” she said. “It’s always been a struggle because I think Japanese people have a hard time marketing me or putting me in a box.” She paused to acknowledge how challenging her “brand” might be for Japanese producers and music executives. “Musically, visually, sonically - what do I do? The good and the bad is I can sing any genre.”

Loneliness would come out in “simple moments where I’m literally alone in the booth.” Those times are when she recalls she felt the most disconnected as an artist. “You need an outside perspective or someone you can trust who can point things out on the outside,” she said and added, “That can be as literal as being in a studio booth. I’m in that world, alone.”

Kay pointed to the recording of “Koi ni Ochitara” as an example of when she felt the most alone - and at odds - in the recording studio. That song would become Kay’s biggest hit and one that she deeply appreciates and loves today. But the recording process was challenging because it strayed so far from the kind of musician Kay wanted to be. The melodies, she explained, are pure J-Pop, so she found herself working harder to infuse R&B into the vocals.

“That was one of my biggest hits and I was struggling because I didn’t like it. I remember I had to run outside and I cried because I was just so confused,” she said. “I wanted guidance and there was none.”

Kay knows that this is not a story singular to her. Plenty of singers, she acknowledged, have songs in their discography that they initially didn’t like become their biggest hits. There is a process, of course, to trusting your producers.

“But that song,” she said, her soft voice rising slightly, “it was not me. I grew up heavily influenced by R&B, especially with my debut album, and then here comes ‘Koni Ochitara’ which was a super bubblegum, J-Pop sound. I just couldn't identify myself with the song, so I was hella struggling in the booth.”

The success of “Koi ni Ochitara” was a double edged sword. Kay was more popular than ever in Japan but she was facing a delicate balancing act. Her label wanted more pop music, while she fought for R&B. As a result, the ensuing albums lacked the tightness of Kay’s earlier works with Michiko and T-Kura. This, to my ears, was largely due to Kay trying to fit into a box that was never made for her.

Kay put the effect bluntly: “It felt like my core started to shake.”

In 2013, Kay, eager for a change and the opportunity to professionally re-establish herself, moved to New York City. Becoming a global singer was an important goal for Kay, one that she had in mind ever since she released her first album. “I didn’t take anyone with me to New York. I went by myself. But the label was hoping,” she recalled, “that Crystal lands a deal.”

She knew, though, that she had her work cut out for her. A handful of Asian artists, including Kay’s peers, had tried and failed to make it before her. In 2004, Utada released their English language debut Exodus, a critically lauded album which Utada largely produced herself. But Utada expressed frustration in the press and in the album’s lyrics about being boxed in by their success in Japan. On “Crossover” she sings, “I don’t wanna cross over between this genre, that genre,” and on “Aminato” she questions the whole damn system: “This is something new and interesting/ Why are you trying to classify it?” BoA, too, had attempted to break into the U.S. with an uncharacteristically sexual single titled “Eat You Up”. She would later call the year she spent in North America the loneliest of her life.

The original idea proposed by her company was that Kay would stay for three months. But Kay quickly found that three months wasn’t long enough to network and meet with labels. So, three months became six months, which eventually turned into a year and a half. “That trip was monumental but it was hard,” she said. “It was like this girl leaving her safe bubble and being dropped into this chaos that is New York.”

Kay learned quickly that artists in New York had a certain charisma, a way of selling their work, that felt completely foreign to her. “The biggest slap in the face was that I’d have these moments where I had the opportunity to meet with a big producer or manager and I just could not self-pitch. I did not have the ability,” she admitted. “Growing up in Japan, there is no need to self-pitch. It is a very consensus based society. No one wants to stick out. No one should stick out.”

Often after meeting with a producer or music industry executives, Kay would receive reports from a handler connected to her company in Japan that people thought she was stuck-up. The feedback could be brutal. The Americans would be irritated, asking, “Why is she so quiet? Is she not interested? Does she think she can make it just because she has a career in Japan?”

Kay looked for solutions. She talked with an acting coach who suggested she might have social anxiety and advised that she participate in acting and public speaking classes. Maybe then she could learn how to project confidence. But the larger issue, Kay was coming to realize, was that she had never been forced to reckon with her heritage.

“I don’t think I had a period of time to be curious about my identity because I didn’t have people like me around or on TV to look up to,” she realized. “I kind of just put all of that, the identity stuff, on the backburner. I grew up having this identity complex without questioning what Black culture or Korean heritage is.”

As her mind started to expand, Kay also began talking about her identity with friends. “Do you realize you have a career in Japan and you’re not even Japanese?” she remembered one friend saying to her. “You’re singing in both English and Japanese. You speak both languages fluently. You should be proud of yourself.”

Kay recalled it as a lightbulb, pivotal moment in her journey.

“It was so simple and yet, I never looked at it that way because I was trying to fit in. I never saw that angle. I realized, I need to give myself a pat on the back,” she affirmed. “I need to be more proud of myself.” From there, Kay’s perspective began to shift.

Though she recorded what she estimates to be more than seventy demos, Kay never got a record deal. But by the end of her time in New York, she was determined to not go home empty handed. “I wanted to leave a mark in some way. I didn’t get signed. I didn’t turn into this big American dream,” she said. “But I did plant a lot of seeds and I wondered, What is it that I can do to leave a mark?”

Then it hit her. She could organize a concert.

For the show, Kay put together a setlist of covers, some of her biggest hits and new songs she had recorded. She found a guitarist for an acoustic set, booked a venue, and - to her shock - sold out the first night. Then she added a second night. Fans came from everywhere to see Kay. They drove for ten hours, flew across the country and told her how much her music meant to them over the past decade.

“Oh my god, the love I felt? It was insane,” she reflected. “I just was really proud of myself that I could pull this off and I was so pissed at myself at the same time, like, why didn’t you do this when you first got to New York?!”

It’s been a decade since Kay returned from New York but it’s never too late to start over. In a few weeks, Kay will begin her North American tour and will properly begin what maybe she was too timid to start in 2013.

Last year, she performed at an anime convention in Atlanta and was touched by how many Black fans told her that she was an influence on their own lives. That show, plus a few in LA, gave her the confidence to try a tour.

“This is all new. We’re about to f–k around and find out,” she said with a laugh. “But I think it’s gonna be good. We were able to put together a really great hour set for the anime convention and we could see how it would work.”

Recently, Kay has been busy going through her discography, pulling together a setlist that spans her 25 years in music. She’s made peace with the fact that even on her most J-Pop coded songs, they are still made with her flair. “Ko ni Ochitara”, too, has been rearranged into a song that she can be proud of and feel like it is her own. At 39, she said, she feels more confident than ever with what she can do vocally. But more than anything, she is open to the future and has finally started to understand the impact of her legacy. She is also eager for her mother to see her influence. This career is something that they built together, and perhaps, something only the two of them can understand. It is through her mother’s bravery, Kay surmises, that she is here today.

“My goal is to perform more abroad and to continue to bridge the gap as a representative of J-R&B in Asia,” Kay told me. By doing that she said, “I hope to be a role model for the next generation.” What comes next, she said, is up in the air. But by doing this retrospective and looking back at her career, she’s begun to see why Crystal Kay, the artist, was such a distinctive force in Japanese music. She is still, to this day, unmatched as a pioneer of R&B in Japan. But she’s ready to see what she can give the world, adding, “I have yet to reach my full potential.” She is open, perhaps for the first time, to the idea that a second act is before her.

“This isn’t us doing a Crystal Kay world debut,” Kay said with years of wisdom behind her. “There’s no more borders now. There’s just all the possibilities.”

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