Composer Joe Hisaishi was born on December 6, 1950, in Nakano City, Nagano Prefecture. His real name was Mamoru Fujisawa. He began calling himself Joe Hisaishi during his university years, using the kanji characters of the name of Quincy Jones, who was popular at the time. He began playing the violin at the age of four, and by the time he was in kindergarten, his father would take him to see hundreds of films every year. After entering the composition department at the Kunitachi College of Music in 1969, he developed an interest in minimal music and began his career as a contemporary musician. While still a student, he began providing music for concerts and other events, and after graduating, he focused on arranging hit songs. He produced the CD series "New Sounds in Brass," featuring arrangements of a wide variety of music for wind orchestra, and was commissioned by the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra to rewrite numerous film scores for orchestra. In 1981, he released his debut album, "MKWAJU," based on minimal music. The following year, he released his first solo album, "INFORMATION," for which Hisaishi wrote both the lyrics and sang, establishing himself as a pioneer of minimal music in Japan. However, it was the 1984 animated film "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" that really brought him to fame. While the film itself performed mediocrely at the box office, subsequent VHS and DVD sales were strong, and the soundtrack, "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: To a Faraway Land," reached number eight on the Oricon album chart.
Hisaishi subsequently began composing music for numerous films, including those by Hayao Miyazaki, and won the Japan Academy Award for Excellence in Original Music in 1991. The following year, he received the Japan Academy Award for Best Original Music for his work on films such as "Ano Natsu, Ichiban Shizukana Umi" (The Silent Sea) and "Koika Monogatari" (The Tale of a Babies). In 2001, he made his directorial debut with "Quartet," which was selected for the Montreal Film Festival and garnered critical acclaim as Japan's first fully-fledged musical film. Meanwhile, in 2004, he founded the New Japan Philharmonic World Dream Orchestra and became its music director. The project aims to rediscover fascinating music from around the world, and its concerts have featured a wide variety of masterpieces, from film scores to classical music. In 2008, he conducted the large-scale orchestra of 1,200 musicians, including orchestral instruments, a brass band, a choir, and a marching band, and also participated in the concert as a pianist. The following year, he made his debut as a classical conductor, bringing classical music, interpreted from the perspective of a contemporary musician, to a wider audience. In recognition of these efforts, he was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2009. In 2010, he became a visiting professor at the Kunitachi College of Music, where he is actively involved in mentoring the next generation of musicians.
