Zard began when the former CEO of Being Corporation, Daikō Nagato, recruited a 24-year-old model named Sachiko Kamachi. Changing her name to Izumi Sakai in an attempt to cut off her past, she created a group called Zard. Zard made a breakthrough with the release of their debut single February 10, 1991
Good-bye My Loneliness, which was a theme song for the Fuji TV drama "Ideals and Reality of Marriage" featuring
Misako Tanaka. The song was very successful, reaching No. 9 in the
Oricon rankings. Zard's next two singles did not sell as well. The fourth, took a slightly different approach. The group's rock style had morphed to popular while the seemingly dark music videos turned to a relatively brighter image. In fact, half of Zard's official appearances on TV were related to performing this song, which sold 440,000 copies. At that time,
Music Station host Kazuyoshi Morita (aka
Tamori) asked Sakai what had taken Zard so long to be on stage. Sakai's reply was that they had wanted to make sure Zard would be an economically viable project and hence did not want to go public prematurely. The major breakthrough for the group came with their sixth single in 1993, "
Makenaide", which became No. 1 in the Oricon charts and went on to sell over 1.8 million copies. Zard went on to release two more songs that reached No. 1, "
Yureru Omoi" and "
Kitto Wasurenai" in the same year. An album titled "Yureru Omoi" featuring both "Makenaide" and "Yureru Omoi" sold two million copies, the first million milestone for the group in album sales. In fact, Being was so successful in the early 1990s that it was called Being Boom. No one sold more CDs than Zard in this year. In 1996, Zard had one more million-selling hit, "
My Friend". Although their sales fluctuated among six digits in sales for the remainder of the twentieth century, nine of twenty-one singles reached No. 1 and six reached No. 2. Only two could not break the top four mark. Since they also had three hits selling one million and one other hitting two million copies. On August 31, 1999, Zard held their first concert aboard the
cruise ship Pacific Venus, where six hundred people were randomly selected out of a million applicants. The DVD for this concert, released on January 26, 2000, had a limited production of 300,000 copies. Besides being the driving force of Zard (and so much so that it became synonymous with her alone), Izumi Sakai was a very prolific
lyricist. She wrote 150 songs during her 17-year career (numerous songs for other artists as well as all of the Zard songs except for two, and from their first album,
Good-bye My Loneliness, which were written by Daria Kawashima,) and she released several books of poetry as well. An editorial in the
Asahi Shimbun claimed that the secret to Zard's success was that while the trend in Japan showed a decrease in the number of music programs on television, Sakai used late night commercials to air her voice and so advertise her works. She also wrote songs for other artists, most notably for the
J-pop groups that shared her management company:
Field of View,
Wands and
Deen, and the late mainland
Taiwanese singer
Teresa Teng. She also wrote the lyrics for and participated in the collaboration for the single featuring J-pop groups Zard,
Zyyg,
Rev &
Wands. The single also featured famed Japanese
baseball hero
Shigeo Nagashima. Some of her singles were used in
anime, such as
Slam Dunk,
Dragon Ball GT and
Detective Conan. The lyrics of by
Field of View, the opening theme song of
Dragon Ball GT, is by Izumi Sakai. Afterward, Zard covered this song in the album
Today Is Another Day. Zard's most successful single, has been used as a theme song for
Nippon Television program 24-hour TV, an annual Japanese television program in which a celebrity host is on screen continually for a whole day. Sakai said that she was honored at the song's being chosen and looked forward to watching the show. She also said that since
Makenaide was widely appreciated by the public, she often felt as if that song was not hers to keep. Sakai had a reputation for being mysterious. This is partly because her record label did not release much personal information on their artists, but also because she did not make very many personal appearances. She rarely appeared on any live TV music programs (e.g.
TV Asahi's
Music Station), which had been the main public relations tool for the record industry in Japan since 1993, or made any public appearances. Her first concert was in 1999, this being held on a
cruise ship for a mere 600 members of her fan club (300 entries x2 among 2 million concert ticket requests). Her first and only concert tour, "What A Beautiful Moment Tour", was held in 2004, 13 years after her debut. Almost every concert was sold out at the time. The tour ended up having 10 concerts spanning 4 months from March to July 2004, with the final concert held in the famed
Nippon Budokan. Although Zard began as a group, Sakai's dominance within it has led to the name "Zard" often being used in Japan to refer to her alone, as a solo female singer. She used to hold the female record in Japan for most single sales until
Ayumi Hamasaki released "
No Way to Say". According to the
Yomiuri Shimbun, as of August 2007, Zard was No. 8 for the overall total in Japan. She had had 12 singles reach the No. 1 spot on the
Oricon Singles Charts, and 9 albums reach the No. 1 spot on the Oricon Album Charts. 43 of her singles reached top 10 in the Oricon rankings. Zard has released a total of 45 singles and 17 albums. Zard was also featured in Tak Matsumoto's
Ihoujin (August 27, 2003). This single was later included in the cover album
The Hit Parade produced by Tak Matsumoto. On a trivial note, Zard's album "
Oh My Love" released in 1994 reached No. 1 for the 500th edition of the Oricon Rankings after it began in 1970. She has had 12 singles reach the No. 1 spot on the
Oricon.
Post-Izumi Sakai Zard On January 23, 2008, an album based on fan requests was released, titled Zard Request Best: Beautiful Memory. NTV Morning News program, Zoom In Super's December 28, 2007 reports that over 500,000 entries were mailed to Being. Surprisingly, Makenaide and Yureru Omoi were not in the top 3, though they did make the top 10. The three songs garnering most votes were 1) Ano Hohoemi o Wasurenaide, 2) Shoujo no Koro ni Modotta Mitai ni, 3) Kakegae no Naimono. When this album hit number one in the Oricon charts, it marked the eleventh time Zard/Sakai had done so, matching the record held by
Dreams Come True for the most number ones by female vocal groups. == Sakai's death ==