Yoko Minamino was a major Japanese pop/rock star of the 1980s and '90s. She made her debut on Sony Music in 1985, when she was in her teens, and went on to enjoy a string of more than a dozen hit singles in Japan, coming in somewhere midway between Cyndi Lauper and Kate Bush, mostly in lightly orchestrated but lively pop/rock settings that played well off of the cool, youthful vibrancy of her singing. Since the mid-'90s, she has reestablished herself as an actress in soap operas in Japan and achieved even bigger stardom in that sphere. ~ Bruce Eder