Who sang Ai no Uta, the Pikmin song?

This hub already tells how the Pikmin commercial song outsold the game it advertised. This page is about the people. Ai no Uta, Song of Love, was performed by Strawberry Flower, a Japanese group fronted by a soft female vocal over a wistful arrangement, singing from the Pikmins point of view: creatures who follow their leader, work, fight, and sometimes fall, and keep following anyway. The lyric, gently sad under a sweet melody, is the whole reason the song escaped the commercials.

The song was made for television first. Nintendo commercials for the 2001 GameCube launch used Ai no Uta over footage of Pikmin marching through a giant sized world, and the spots lodged in the public memory in a way game advertising rarely does. Requests followed, radio picked it up, and the song was released as a commercial single in December 2001, climbing the Japanese charts into the new year while the GameCube itself sold at a slower pace.

Strawberry Flower returned for Pikmin 2 with another advertising song, Tane no Uta, the Song of Seeds, attempting the same trick twice, and Ai no Uta itself has been kept alive by the series: it appears in later games, in Nintendo concerts and arrangements, and as an unlockable in other Nintendo titles. The group remains a one story act in the public mind, but the story is a remarkable one for a backing track to a strategy game about gardening.

The collectible is the CD single itself, Japanese pressings of Ai no Uta and Tane no Uta, with their Pikmin sleeve art, alongside the commercial era goods. They are inexpensive, evocative objects, the sound of the series Japanese launch pressed into plastic, and they belong on the Pikmin shelf next to the GameCube guides, where the rest of the 2001 story is kept.