icon
BEGIN
About BEGIN
Formed by three childhood friends from Ishigaki Island in 1990, BEGIN built a long, quietly successful career around Okinawan-language pop songs that drew on shima uta tradition without dressing it up as exotica. Their 1998 song Nada Sōsō became a national standard after Rimi Natsukawa's 2001 cover, and Shimanchu nu Takara is now Okinawa's de facto regional anthem, taught in schools across the island chain.