Sakura Miyawaki

The Discipline of the Shiki Theatre

Sakura Miyawaki is no product of Korean chance. By 2004 she was already on the stage of the Shiki Theatre Company, playing young Nala in The Lion King. She was barely six years old and already understood that the stage is a place where you survive on discipline. Her parents enrolled her in singing and dance classes in her native Kagoshima because the girl never stopped moving in front of the television.

In 2011, she joined the first generation of HKT48 in Fukuoka. She was the only member of the group who made it onto the main team from day one. But the Japanese idol industry looks not for technical perfection but for charisma and a story of personal overcoming. She quickly understood the game and began climbing the ranks in AKB48's general elections (a mass voting system where fans buy records to vote for their favorite).

Her ambition was never a secret.

In 2014, she took the center spot on the single Kibouteki Refrain. It was an aggressive move by management to refresh the group's faces. In 2015, she starred in the series Majisuka Gakuen 4, playing a transfer student fighting to reach the top of a school for delinquents. The role was a metaphor for her own career, since she was always the outsider who came in to take the place of the veterans.

Seoul's Transformation in 2018

In 2018, she decided to audition for the survival show Produce 48 in South Korea. She was an established star in Japan with a steady salary and a millions-strong fan base. But she preferred to start from scratch as a trainee in a foreign system that looked down on Japanese dance style. During the first episode of the show, the Korean judges criticized her lack of basic technique. She did not cry in front of the cameras (something common in the format) and simply trained sixteen hours a day.

And the market responded forcefully.

She finished in second place in the show's final and debuted with IZ*ONE in October 2018. The group sold 80,822 copies of its first EP in the first week. That figure broke the all-time debut record for a female group in Korea. During the two and a half years the project lasted, she completely transformed her image. She gave up her straight bangs and the childlike look from Fukuoka for a sharper visual style and choreography that demanded millimeter-level precision.

In 2021, IZ*ONE disbanded as planned under its original contract. Many thought she would return to Japan and retire as a J-pop legend. But in June 2021, she announced her official graduation from HKT48 after ten years of service. At her farewell concert at Marine Messe Fukuoka, it became clear that the Japanese market had become too small for her. So she secretly returned to Seoul to sign a contract that would change the rules of the industry.

The global takeover of 2022

In May 2022, she debuted for the third time with LE SSERAFIM under Source Music (a HYBE subsidiary). The group's name is an anagram of I'm Fearless, and the concept revolved around resilience. In the documentary The World Is My Oyster, she is seen crying from frustration during vocal recordings for the first album. Despite having been in the industry for a decade, producers demanded that she change the way she breathes when singing.

Because perfection in K-pop doesn't allow for previous legacies.

In 2023 the group released UNFORGIVEN and made it onto the Billboard 200 chart at No. 6. She was actively involved in writing lyrics and in designing her own cosmetics brand, Cran by Molak. But success brought fierce scrutiny of her live vocal ability. In April 2024 the group performed at Coachella, and Korean critics were merciless about the group's pitch during its 40-minute set.

She responded with a statement on Weverse defending the team's effort above technical perfection. In 2024, the album EASY reached number 8 on the U.S. sales chart. The advertising contract she has held with Louis Vuitton since 2023 is managed directly from the company's headquarters in Paris. In her agency's latest quarterly audit, it was confirmed that merchandise sales tied to her image account for 22% of the total revenue of the women's division.