Yuko Mizutani -- Drive Planet（ドライブ・プラネット）

 

When I saw the name of Yuko Mizutani（水谷優子）on YouTube, I wondered where I'd seen it before and then I remembered that she was the first seiyuu who voiced Sakiko Sakura（さくらさきこ）, the long-suffering older sister of Momoko Sakura（さくらももこ）, aka Chibi Maruko-chan（ちびまる子ちゃん）for the long-running anime "Chibi Maruko-chan" on Fuji-TV. I also remembered that sadly Mizutani had passed away back in 2016 from cancer at the age of 51.

Over the last few days, I've written about a seiyuu, Mami Koyama（小山茉美）, who contributed her own brand of pop music in the 1980s and a fresh-voiced 90s pop singer, Mutsumi Inoue（井上睦都実）. I guess that I can then put the two observations together for Mizutani since she put out an album in March 1994 titled "Vibit".  There's very sparse information on her CD output in an otherwise voluminous J-Wiki article on Mizutani so I'm not sure whether "Vibit" was her only album of songs or not. 

However, the first track "Drive Planet" is a pretty nice pop song to start things off. Lyricist Yuri Asada（浅田有理） and composer Katsuki Maeda（前田克樹）were behind this short-and-sweet tune that rather represents what happy middle-of-the-road pop music by female singers sounded like in the early 1990s. It's kinda why I am also reminded of singers like Inoue, although Mizutani's vocals have a bit more nasality.