Do we like them?

Do we like Hikaru Utada?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Public support for non-binary visibility and a political lyric on surnames, with no harmful words found, but the good-person record is thinner than the harm record.

Utada is about as big as pop gets in Japan. The daughter of an enka singer and a famous music producer, they grew up between the US and Japan, and their first single hit when they were 16. Debut album First Love still holds the Japanese sales record, and Utada wrote the music and sang every vocal on it themselves.

At 28 they stepped away from the spotlight, saying they wanted to learn to be a regular person, then returned in 2016. That's a rare thing for a star at their level: they walked away at the peak and came back on their own terms.

In June 2021 Utada came out as non-binary on an Instagram livestream, saying “happy Pride Month!” PinkNews reported fans praising it as one of the bravest things they had seen from a prominent person in Japan. Utada had also written about feeling “forced to misrepresent” themselves with gendered titles, and floated a neutral prefix, “Mys”.

On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up. We found no remarks against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no dodgy company on their projects. In 2025 the single Mine or Yours asked when Japan would allow married couples to keep separate surnames. Right-leaning accounts said Utada had no right to weigh in, while others praised the stance, so it clearly cost them some goodwill.

On the good-person side, no court cases, lawsuits or credible allegations came up, which is a clean sheet but also a thin one. Some of our page fetches were blocked, so we couldn't read about their charity work or how they treat staff first-hand. Tabloid territory in July 2026 carried rumours about Utada, and the aggregator that ran them later said they looked unfounded, so we've left them out. Based on what we could read, they're a yes.