Kyu Sakamoto born Hisashi Oshima (December 10, 1941 - August 12, 1985) was a popular Japanese singer and actor.

Kyu was born in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture as the youngest among nine siblings and his parents; Hiroshi Sakamoto and Iku Sakamoto. Which both worked at a restaurant. Already in high school Kyu began to sing and got very popular, in 1958 he joined the japanese pop-band "The Drifters" as a singer.

His most popular song, Ue o muite arukō ("Looking up while walking") known as Sukiyaki in the US, was a hit in Japan and topped the Billboard pop charts in the United States in 1963 -- to date the first and only song sung entirely in Japanese to do so. The song text is a tragic story, which many Americans are unaware of. The song was translated into English by the female R&B duo A Taste of Honey in 1981; the English version, which told the story of a love gone wrong, was almost as big a hit as the original, reaching #3 on the Hot 100, and was brought back into the Top 10 once more by the R&B vocal group 4 P.M. in 1994. Sakamoto, however, had only one other song reach the U.S. charts, "China Nights (Shina no Yoru)," which peaked at #58 in 1963.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukiyaki_%28song%29