Hikaru Utada -- Movin' On Without You

Well, first off, congratulations to Hikaru Utada（宇多田ヒカル） for getting engaged for a 2nd time. I'm no longer in Japan, but I'm pretty sure that on the day of that announcement, the media wags there were trying to put every scrap of information on the lucky fiancé through every form of media.

In any case, under these circumstances, perhaps this may not be the best Hikki song to put on since it deals with breaking up and daring the poor sap to stop her. However, just a few months after Utada had released the cool "Automatic" to mass popularity, she came up with the more uptempo and beat-happy "Movin' On Without You" as her second single from February 1999....in fact, I think it's now 2 days after the 15th anniversary of that release.

After repeatedly seeing the video for "Automatic" with Utada strutting inside that dimly-lit apartment with the low ceiling, the new video came out with her in a more space-age setting. And like the debut video, it also got the heavy rotation treatment on the ranking shows. People were still marveling at the fact that this Japanese-American could create "Automatic", and then out comes the just-as-cool "Movin' On".

According to the J-Wiki article on the song, the CD was sold in the two sizes of 8 and 12 cm. I will just go with the more successful of the two formats, and say that the 12-cm version hit the top spot on Oricon and became the 16th-ranked song of the year with a little over 1.5 million copies sold. Probably by this point, the Japanese media (and her new fans) were begging her to come on TV if they hadn't already started to do so. From what I remember back then, they were just saying "Who IS this girl?"