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At a very young age, Watanabe Mizuki has expressed a great interest and talent in music. She always wanted to become one of the singers she hears on the radio, but living in such a rural area as Hokkaido, there were very few opportunities for her. One of Mizuki's biggest hobbies during her high school years was going to a local beauty salon. And since she was a regular customer, she had become very good friends with the salon manager.
It was at that time when there was an idol audition being held, and posters were being put up in over 20,000 beauty salons all over Japan. Mizuki had kept looking over the poster, and the salon manager realized this. So she decided to suggest that Mizuki enter the contest. Hundreds of people competed, but in the end, Mizuki was the winner.
Immediately postponing her other plans in life, she decided to chase after her musical dreams. After graduating high school, she moved to Tokyo and soon after that, she was signed under Universal Victor. Under her full name, Watanabe Mizuki, she released I WILL, her debut single. Following that, she also released another single called Ambition, but she wasn't asked to release anything else after that. Both singles are now out of print in most Japanese CD stores.
After the release of Ambition, her brief career ended. However, she would not give up. She kept taking singing lessons at a studio, and eventually made a demo tape with the help of a writer. Soon, she was introduced to a producer named Tord Backstrom.
Tord Backstrom was looking for someone to perform a
song written by a Swedish writer and upon searching, he found Mizuki. Immediately, he knew Mizuki had what it took to become a star. In the year 2003, Mizuki was on her way to Sweden to meet her creative team. They were very surprised once they met her, and they weren't even sure whether she was Japanese or not. This was because she spoke English very well, better than most common Japanese people, and she liked to give hugs (normally, Japanese women like to keep to their own space)!
First, they had planned to release some music in Sweden. Mizuki re-debuted under the name Miz. Her Swedish debut single, Waiting, hit charts soon after and debuted at 8. Soon enough, an album was also released. Story Untold emerged on the scene on September 22, 2004 and contains 10 all-English songs.
By that time, she had also released some other music. Her Japanese re-debut single New Day came out that same year. At that time, most of the biggest names in J-Pop were high-pitched, nasally singers. This was not the case for Miz. She was a fresh new face re-appearing in Japan, and people fell in love with her rich, strong voice. New Day debuted at 20 on Oricon charts. To promote her first Japanese album, Say It's Forever, Miz was invited to a Channel V-hosted concert in Taiwan along with other local and foreign artists, she performed 3 songs, New Day, Waiting for, and Say It's Forever. Also, she attended a show AIUEO to gain more publicity in her short visit, the host was apparently her friend before she made her major debut in Japan. She became one of the most popular Japanese artists in Taiwan that year.
Since that day, Miz has been steadily releasing her music up to today. She writes most of her original Japanese lyrics, and is becoming quite fluent in English, that pretty soon she could be writing her own English songs also.
Miz has released her latest album Mizrock and done some live performances at radio stations. She is coming out with a new mini-album, titled "Best Friend" on July 11, 2007 under a new record company Nayutawave Records.
