Haruomi Hosono Japanese Singer From Minato

Early life

Haruomi Hosono was born on 9 July 1947 in Minato, Tokyo. He is a grandson of Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese passenger aboard the Titanic and one of those who survived its sinking. He attended Rikkyo Niiza Junior and Senior High School and went on to Rikkyo University.

Career

Hosono first drew attention in Japan as the bass player of Apryl Fool, a psychedelic rock group that also featured the drummer Takashi Matsumoto and released an album in 1969. He and Matsumoto then formed Happy End with Eiichi Ohtaki and Shigeru Suzuki, a folk rock group that is remembered as an influential one. A Hosono composition from its catalogue, "Kaze wo Atsumete" from 1971, was used decades later in the film Lost in Translation. After Happy End split in 1972, Hosono and Suzuki founded Caramel Mama with Tatsuo Hayashi and Masataka Matsutoya. The group soon became Tin Pan Alley and spent its time as a session band for other artists, including Yumi Arai.

His first solo record, Hosono House, appeared in 1973. In the second half of the decade he turned strongly toward electronic sound. Paraiso, made with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi on synthesizers, was released in early 1978 and was credited to a group called Harry Hosono and the Yellow Magic Band. The same trio worked on Pacific that year. Also in 1978 he put out Cochin Moon, an electronic soundtrack for an imagined Indian film, made together with the artist Tadanori Yokoo, Sakamoto and Hideki Matsutake, and inspired by a trip to India. Those sessions led to Yellow Magic Orchestra, the group he led with Sakamoto and Takahashi. Its first album already carried a lot of video game sound.

That interest in game audio came back after the band stopped recording. In 1984 he released Video Game Music, a collection of edited and rearranged material from Namco arcade games, regarded as one of the first albums of its kind. The same year he produced the theme song for the animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, sung by Narumi Yasuda. Other albums from the 1980s include Watering a Flower, S·F·X, Philharmony, Coincidental Music and Omni Sight Seeing, which came out in 1989.

He also wrote for pop singers. Among the songs he composed are "High School Lullaby" for the trio Imokin Trio in 1981 and "Kinku" for Akina Nakamori in 1983, and he wrote material for Seiko Matsuda in the early 1980s. Through the 1990s he moved further toward world music and collaboration. He worked with Bill Laswell on Interpieces Organization in 1996, released Good Sport in 1995, and started the Daisyworld label to publish experimental artists from Japan and elsewhere.

In 2002 he formed the duo Sketch Show with Takahashi. When Sakamoto joined their projects, that combination was billed as Human Audio Sponge. In 2007 he supervised and performed on the soundtrack of the animated film Appleseed Ex Machina. His album HoSoNoVa appeared in 2011, followed by Heavenly Music in 2013.

In 2018 the label Light in the Attic reissued several of his early albums, four of which had not been available outside Japan before. That summer he played his first solo concerts in the United Kingdom, and in 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of his music career, he released Hochono House, a largely electronic remake of Hosono House with the track order reversed. He then gave his first solo concerts in the United States, in New York and Los Angeles. A documentary, No Smoking, was released that year, and an exhibition called Hosono Sightseeing opened in Tokyo.

In July 2025 he gave his first British concert in seven years, at the Southbank Centre in London. Harry Styles has said his album Harry's House was named after Hosono's 1970s record. A new studio album, Yours Sincerely, was announced for release in September 2026.

Recognition

In 2003 the retailer HMV placed him at number 44 in its ranking of the hundred leading Japanese pop acts. He is also credited with helping shape city pop and Shibuya-kei, and with contributing to early electronic music in Japan through his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Public roles

Besides recording, Hosono has acted in a small number of films. He played a record shop manager in Norwegian Wood in 2010 and appeared in the 1985 documentary Tokyo Melody about Ryuichi Sakamoto. He also supplied the Japanese dub voice of a character named Scrap in Isle of Dogs.