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Singer Ayumi Hamasaki Weds UCLA Medical Student

Singer Ayumi Hamasaki announced today on her Club Ayu fanclub site that the 35-year-old singer married her fiance, a 25-year-old male medical student at the University of California. In the blog post titled, "Just married☆," Hamasaki wrote "Today is the beginning of our life as a couple."

According to Hamasaki's agency, the two wed in Los Angeles at the end of February, but Hamasaki's mother submitted their marriage registration in Japan today.

The couple had gotten engaged in December. According to a source linked to Hamasaki, she was not pregnant. The two had met during the 2012 New Year's holidays through a friend, and began dating last spring.

Hamasaki has already returned to Los Angeles and plans to continue working and creating music from L.A.

Hamasaki had told fans that she had married Manuel Schwarz, an Austrian actor living in America, in Las Vegas on January 1, 2011 (about four months after meeting him). However, she announced a year later in January 2012 that she had gotten divorced. Hamasaki had not registered her marriage with Schwarz in Japan, so her upcoming marriage with the medical student would be considered her first in Japan.

Hamasaki is also writing and singing the "Pray" theme song for Buddha 2: Tezuka Osamu no Buddha - Owarinaki Tabi, the second film in the planned trilogy based on the late Osamu Tezuka's Buddha manga. It will be Hamasaki's first theme song for an anime film since her "No More Words" song for InuYasha the Movie: Affections Touching Across Time in 2001, and only her seventh theme song for any film, live-action or anime.

Hamasaki contributed theme songs to the InuYasha television anime series, the live-action film SHINOBI - Heart Under Blade, and the live-action Dragonball: Evolution film. She played Yuri Sakazaki in the original anime video Art of Fighting (Battle Spirits Ryuko no Ken), and her "Connected" song inspired an animated music video.

Source: Oricon Beauty via Tokyo Hive (Link 2)