Why Japanese singer Ado does not show her face: ‘More beautiful than the original’

SINGAPORE – No one, save for those in her inner circle presumably, knows what Japanese singer Ado looks like. The J-pop star famously uses an animated avatar to represent herself. Go to her gigs and you see only her silhouette as she performs onstage.

“I’m not the type to reveal myself in public. And when people don’t reveal their entire persona in public, then there’s always an element of mysteriousness involved,” the 23-year-old tells The Straits Times in a recent Zoom interview – with her camera switched off, of course.

She was speaking in Japanese, via an interpreter, to promote her new single Ai Ai A.

Rather than show her face, she prefers to have fans paint a mental picture of what she looks like.

“People use their imagination, right? And a lot of the time, they end up imagining something or someone, perhaps more beautiful than the original.”

At her sold-out debut show here at the Singapore Indoor Stadium in May 2025, the singer performed while obscured in a cage dubbed the “Ado Box”.

The singer says she was struck by how passionate her fans in Singapore are. “The songs are in an entirely different language. But they must have listened to the songs a million times because they sang along as well, and it was just so much fun that time went by so swiftly.”

The Tokyo-born singer started out by posting cover songs on platforms such as YouTube and the Japanese video sharing service Niconico, gaining traction with her powerful, layered voice and raw emotional delivery.

Her breakthrough came in October 2020 with the release of her debut single Usseewa. Thanks to the social media sensation, she achieved the distinction of being the youngest female singer to top Japan’s Oricon Digital Singles Chart.

In early 2022, she dropped her debut album Kyogen, which went straight to No. 1 on both the Billboard Japan Hot Albums chart and the Oricon Albums chart.

In the same year, her fan base expanded worldwide after her tune New Genesis became the theme song for the popular Japanese animated film One Piece Film: Red. The track became the first Japanese song to top Apple Music’s Global Top 100 chart.

She would go on to release more songs for animated shows, such as Cat’s Eye (2025), and films such as The Silent Service: The Great Sea Battle Of The Arctic Ocean (2025).

Her sophomore album Zanmu (2024) also went to No. 1 on the Billboard Japan and Oricon Albums charts.

Her newest release Ai Ai A was written by popular Japanese producer Kikuo, who also wrote Aishite Aishite Aishite (2015), a song that Ado previously covered.

“It’s unsettling, but not too unsettling,” she says of Ai Ai A. “It’s got a nice mix of this pop style, almost dream-like, like an animation that you might have seen when you were a child. It’s got that classic feel, almost kind of like the classic Disney Pinocchio type of style.

“I wanted to include a sort of pop texture, something that kind of moves along, like rummaging through a toy box, almost like circus-style fun to it. But it also incorporates the dark, negative sides of human emotions.”

Ado sees her world tours as part of a larger cultural wave, one she says she did not create alone. Besides Singapore, her last world tour in 2025 also included stops across the United States, Europe, Australia and South America.

"Being able to go on these large-scale world tours is an example of how Japanese culture and Japanese music are being looked upon by the rest of the world. There seems to be so much more interest in that nowadays.

“But you can’t take that for granted. The flame has to be stoked, and I would love to be a part of that.”