Ami Suzuki -- love the island

Marcos V. wrote the first two articles for Ami Suzuki（鈴木あみ）, a teen singer who had been coming up the ranks in the late 1990s when a combination of dirty dealings from her management company and legal pushback from her parents ended up in industry blowback against her, and she was deemed persona non grata by the geinokai for a while at least.

My memories of her coincide with the beginnings of my time at my second of third schools during the late 1990s in Tokyo. I remember riding the Sobu Line along the Kanda River and seeing those fishermen dropping their lines. Yep, when I hear the name Ami Suzuki, that's what comes to mind. Oh yes, there was also that McDonalds that I used to frequent as well. It's a miracle that I've managed to survive to this day considering how often I visited the Golden Arches.

The one Ami-Go（あみ〜ゴ）song that I've always remembered is her debut single "love the island" which had come out in July 1998. Written by Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）and Marc Panther from Globe and composed by Komuro, I hadn't been aware that "love the island" was meant to be a promo tune for commercials sponsored by the Tourism Bureau of the government of Guam (Guam is to Japan as Florida is to us snowbirds in Toronto). In any case, those three words of the title chirped by Suzuki automatically set off those engrams of life in Tokyo at the turn of the century.

"love the island" peaked at No. 5 on Oricon and ended up as the 90th-ranked single for 1998, selling nearly 300,000 copies. It also got placed onto Suzuki's debut album "SA" from March 1999. It hit No. 1 and was the 9th-ranked album for that year, selling over 2 million copies.

According to Wikipedia, once Suzuki got blacklisted in late 2000, all production and sales of the single were stopped cold. However, a new version was recorded and released online in 2011 and was also included in "Ami Selection", an album of her hits.