is a Japanese enka

Enka

is a popular Japanese music genre considered to resemble traditional Japanese music stylistically. Modern enka, however, is a relatively recent musical form which arose in the context of such postwar expressions of modern Japanese nonmaterial nationalism as nihonjinron, while adopting a more...

 singer who was born on September 6, 1977 in Minami-ku

Minami-ku, Fukuoka

is one of the seven wards of Fukuoka City, Japan. As of 2004, it had a population of 247,913 people and an area of 30.98 km2. Its name literally means "south ward." It is bordered by the central, Hakata, Jonan, and Sawara wards of Fukuoka city, and also by the cities of Nakagawa and Kasuga....

, Fukuoka

Fukuoka, Fukuoka

is the capital city of Fukuoka Prefecture and is situated on the northern shore of the island of Kyushu in Japan.Voted number 14 in a 2010 poll of the World's Most Livable Cities, Fukuoka is praised for its green spaces in a metropolitan setting. It is the most populous city in Kyushu, followed by...

, Fukuoka Prefecture

Fukuoka Prefecture

is a prefecture of Japan located on Kyūshū Island. The capital is the city of Fukuoka.- History :Fukuoka Prefecture includes the former provinces of Chikugo, Chikuzen, and Buzen....

, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. His real name is and he is known as "The Prince of Enka" due to his young age and popularity. When he is marketing non-enka music, he goes by KIYOSHI, using capitalized letters of the roman alphabet, instead of kanji

Kanji

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...

and hiragana

Hiragana

is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...

.

His record company is Columbia Music Entertainment

Columbia Music Entertainment

is a Japanese record label founded in 1910 as . It affiliated itself with the Columbia Graphophone Company of the United Kingdom and adopted the standard UK Columbia trademarks in 1931. The company changed its name to Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd. in 1946. It used the Nippon Columbia name until...

, and his agency is Nagara Productions. He was given his stage name by Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi Kitano

is a Japanese filmmaker, comedian, singer, actor, film editor, presenter, screenwriter, author, poet, painter, and one-time video game designer who has received critical acclaim, both in his native Japan and abroad, for his highly idiosyncratic cinematic work. The famed Japanese film critic...

, who initially supported his career.