Joe Hisaishi

• 1. Introduction

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  Joe Hisaishi was born in Nakano, Nagano, Japan, and by the age of four he was already holding a violin, learning through the Suzuki method his parents had chosen for him. Alongside those lessons, his father took him to the cinema again and again, hundreds of films a year, until the relationship between music and moving images was simply the way he understood the world.

  He would go on to write scores for more than a hundred films and solo albums across four decades. He would fill the Budokan with over 1,200 musicians for a single concert. He would sign with Deutsche Grammophon, compose for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and earn a Golden Globe nomination. But none of that quite explains why, when millions of people hear a certain piano melody, something in them quiets down.

  The questions worth asking are not about the awards or the streaming numbers. They are about how a boy from Nagano became the sound of an entire era of Japanese cinema, and what it took to stay relevant across genres and decades without repeating himself.

• 2. A Name Built From Another Name

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  At Kunitachi College of Music, where Hisaishi enrolled in 1969 to major in composition, he was still working under his given name. He collaborated with minimalist artists and took work as a music engraver, the painstaking craft of rendering notation by hand. It was precise, detail-oriented work, and it suited someone whose early compositions grew outward from minimalist principles toward something larger.

  The alias came later, and it came from admiration. Hisaishi had fixed on Quincy Jones, the American musician and composer, as a kind of pole star. The Japanese transliteration of "Quincy" is "Kuinshi," and the kanji Hisaishi chose for his stage name could also be read as "Kuishi" - close enough to ring like a tribute. "Joe" came directly from "Jones." The name was a private act of homage hidden inside a public identity, and almost no one who heard it would know.

  His earliest public compositions appeared in 1974 under that given name, with music for the anime series Gyatoruzu. By 1975 he had given his first public performance. By 1981 his debut album, MKWAJU, was out, followed the next year by Information, a work his label Tokuma described as electropop-minimalist. Those two records announced a composer who was interested in the friction between electronic texture and classical structure, a tension he would keep pulling on for the rest of his career.

• 3. Miyazaki and the Studio Ghibli Sound

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  In 1983, Tokuma - the same label that had released Information - recommended Hisaishi to create an image album for a Hayao Miyazaki film then in development: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It was not a full score; it was a mood document, a way of establishing the emotional register of a film before the animation was finished. It worked well enough that when the film needed a complete score the following year, Hisaishi was the composer.

  That 1984 collaboration became the foundation for one of the most durable partnerships in world cinema. Critics have compared it to the relationship between Steven Spielberg and John Williams, which is a way of saying that the music and the images became mutually dependent, each more legible because of the other.

  In 1985, Hisaishi founded his own recording studio, Wonder Station. A year later he scored Laputa: Castle in the Sky for Miyazaki's newly established Studio Ghibli. Through the 1990s came Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke. In 2001, Spirited Away arrived, and its opening theme, One Summer's Day, accumulated more than 109 million Spotify streams by April 2026. The main theme from Howl's Moving Castle, released in Japan on the 20th of November 2004, would surpass that figure: Merry-Go-Round reached more than 158 million streams by May 2026, making it the most commercially successful individual score of his career.

  Hisaishi has scored all but one of Miyazaki's films. In August 2008, he marked their 25th year of collaboration with a concert featuring the World Dream Symphony Orchestra at the Budokan. More than 1,200 musicians performed that night, and every seat was taken.

• 4. The Kitano Films

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  Takeshi Kitano, who works under the name "Beat" Takeshi, makes films of a very different emotional temperature from Miyazaki's. Where the animated features move through wonder and childhood grief, Kitano's work tends toward violence, stillness, and a bleakness that occasionally breaks into something tender. Hisaishi scored seven of them.

  The list runs from A Scene at the Sea in 1991 through Sonatine in 1993, Kids Return in 1996, Hana-bi in 1997, Kikujiro in 1999, Brother in 2000, and Dolls in 2002. The title track from Kikujiro, a piece called Summer, became one of the most recognized single compositions in Hisaishi's catalogue. It is the kind of melody that travels without requiring any knowledge of its context.

  Scoring for Kitano meant working inside long silences and sparse dialogue, finding music that did not explain what the images were doing but existed alongside them. It was a different discipline from the Ghibli work, and the range it required - the ability to write for a children's film about a flying witch and for a yakuza picture in the same decade - defined what Hisaishi's career would look like.

• 5. Beyond Japan's Borders

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  The score for Departures, an Academy Award-winning film released in 2008, extended Hisaishi's reputation into international award circuits. That same year he composed for Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea and for Jiang Wen's The Sun Also Rises, and he arranged, performed, conducted, and played piano in the World Dream Symphony concert at the Budokan.

  In 2005 he had written the soundtrack for the South Korean film Welcome to Dongmakgol. In 2007 he composed for Frederic Lepage's film Sunny and the Elephant. In 2013 he provided the score for the NHK wildlife documentary Legends of the Deep: Giant Squid, which was narrated by David Attenborough for BBC's Natural World series.

  In May 2018, he made his North American performance debut in California, playing five sold-out concerts at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts with Symphony Silicon Valley. In 2017 he had given three concerts in Paris at the Palais des Congres de Paris. On the 30th of March 2023, he signed an exclusive recording agreement with Deutsche Grammophon. In 2025, his score for A Big Bold Beautiful Journey became his first soundtrack for a Western film.

• 6. Recognition and Later Work

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  Seven Japanese Academy Awards for Best Music arrived over the years: in 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000, 2009, and 2011. On the 28th of June 2013, he was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, among those recognized for distinguished contributions to theatrical motion pictures.

  In November 2009, the Government of Japan awarded him the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon. In November 2023 came the Order of the Rising Sun, 4th Class, Gold Rays with Rosette. The following year, the Annie Awards gave him the Winsor McCay Award for what they called unparalleled achievement and exceptional contributions to animation.

  His Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Music came in 2005 for Howl's Moving Castle. A Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score followed his work on The Boy and the Heron in 2023. In 2010 he became an invited professor at the Japanese National College of Music, and in 2016 he was appointed art director of the Nagano City Art Museum - a return, in some sense, to the prefecture where he had first picked up a violin as a four-year-old.

  On the 20th of February 2020, a career retrospective collection called Dream Songs: The Essential Joe Hisaishi came out through Decca Gold, gathering 28 compositions. In 2022, he contributed to the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage production of My Neighbour Totoro - the same Ghibli title he had scored for cinema in 1988, now reimagined for a live theatre audience.