I first heard Utada through the "Simple and Clean" remix from Kingdom Hearts. I had never seen her, so I imagined her as your typical blonde one-hit-wonder pop starts that came out in the early 2000's. I guessed she was around 17 and wore tight jeans and one of those shirts that stop right above the belly button. Kind of Britney Spears looking.

When I discovered "Sanctuary", the airhead pop star image went away, but I still thought she was blonde XD. When I found out she was Asian I was like oooooh ooook. When I found out she was a huge pop star in Japan and I liked nearly every song of hers I was like :O

It's interesting how new Utada listeners never think she's Asian. Maybe it's because there aren't many (maybe any?) big Asian stars in the English-speaking music industry. I've heard people say they thought she was Swedish or a white American when they heard her KH songs, and others that could have swore she was a black woman when they listened to "Come Back to Me".

When I heard her sing Sanctuary im not joking.....i thought she was......BLACK!!lmaoo

i thought she was american..never in my mind did i think a japanese singer would sing in english so well..

so i looked into it and came up finding her 'passion' performance from her united tour on youtube..i saw the side of her face and she looked super old..like she was 40 or something..i look on wikipedia and saw she was born in 1983..and i spit the water i was drinking..i was like, ehhhh???~~ supposedly she had the best selling album of all time in japan..

My first time hearing Utada was also my first time seeing her, but I thought she was some airheaded, and somewhat (censored)ty person from watching the Easy Breezy video.

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Yes.60% of all of Japan as of 2007 owns a copy of First Love.And I thought she'd have better teeth than she has.Honestly,that's about it.

When I first heard her voice I thought she was maddd black. Lol jk jk funny thought though

I honestly didn't really put much thought into it!

After first playing Kingdom Hearts, I looked her up. I didn't expect her to be Japanese, but I didn't really have an image of her in my head.

Before I listened to any of her songs I already knew that she's one of the top J-Pop artists so I had this prejudgement that she looks super plastic with those so called kawaii looks. Well, after I listened to Simple & Clean, my thoughts didn't change much. It wasn't until I watched the acoustic version of it. Was so surprised. She's not what I thought at all! Was actually quite shocked. Even more shocking when I watched her other videos. She's not plastic at all!

When I first heard her I got her name along with the song that played (it was either "Sakura Drops" or "Uso Mitaina I Love You"), and I was pretty sure she was Asian right off the start. Thing was, I didn't know Hikaru Utada was the same person who sang "Simple and Clean" in Kingdom Hearts for the longest time; it wasn't until I looked in the credits for the game that I had a huge rude awakening. Somehow, though, I don't think I ever imagined Hikki to be anything but Asian, even when I didn't know it was her singing "Simple and Clean": I knew Kingdom Hearts was a Japanese video game so I was fairly sure the singer of the theme song would be Japanese as well. I just kind of had that motif in my head. I was also really young, so I basically thought that everyone in the world spoke English as a dominant language which was why it didn't seem maligned in my head that a Japanese artist would be singing fluently in English. Somehow, that misconception ended up being the truth, though. That's some precarious logic. x.x

Shuri/Eli

i first heard hikaru during her 'automatic' days. i didn't thought about how she might have looked because she's japanese and all. when i saw her on TV, i was pretty amazed about how she looked. very pretty actually.