Originally Posted by asiafinest
"I felt like I'd gone back to school," she says. "If there are rules and regulations, I can't help it, I want to break them."
Finally she confessed to Matsuura that she'd skipped most of the classes. But instead of writing her off, he proposed sending her to New York for some real training. "I thought he was kidding," she says. "I mean, I was 17." Reluctantly she went, staying in a midtown hotel for three months, taking singing classes a few blocks away. "New York was a relief-not all hierarchical and rule-bound," she says. When Hamasaki returned to Japan, Matsuura proposed another challenge. Because she has trouble voicing her thoughts, Hamasaki had over that year corresponded with Matsuura through letters, which must have echoed of simple yet poignant lyrics. He read them and said, "Why don't you try writing songs?" The idea that she could express herself in song imbued her with a new sense of direction. "No one had ever asked anything of me before, or expected anything of me," she says of Matsuura, whom Hamasaki and everyone at Avex calls by his title, senmu, or managing director. "Part of me was flattered; part of me was terrified but didn't want to admit I couldn't do it. Plenty of people had patted my head and said, 'Aren't you cute.' Senmu gets mad, but when he praises me, I know I've won it. He's the one who found me and drew me out."
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