Fumiyo Hayasaka

Fumio Hayasaka (Hayasaka Fumio; August 19, 1914 – October 15, 1955) was a Japanese composer of classical music and film scores.

Hayasaka was born in the city of Sendai on the main Japanese island of Honshū. In 1918, Hayasaka and his family moved to Sapporo on the northern island of Hokkaidō. In 1933, Hayasaka and Akira Ifukube organized the New Music League, which held a new music festival the year after.

Hayasaka won a number of prizes for his early concert works; in 1935, his piece Futatsu no sanka e no zensōkyoku won first prize in a radio competition, and another concert piece, Kodai no bukyoku, won the 1938 Weingartner Prize. Other early works include a Nocturne (1936) for piano and the orchestral Ancient Dance (1938). In 1939, Hayasaka moved to Tokyo to begin a career as film composer. By early 1940, Hayasaka was seen as "a major composer for Japanese Cinema".

After the war, Hayasaka continued working on films, quickly winning recognition for his abilities. In 1946, he received the film music award for An Enemy of the People (Minshū no Teki, 1946) at the first annual Mainichi Film Awards. The year after, 1947, Hayasaka received the Mainichi film music award for Teinosuke Kinugasa's Actress (Joyu).

In the late 1940s, Hayasaka invited his friend Akira Ifukube to write film music with him at Toho Studios. Ifukube's first film score for Toho was for Senkichi Taniguchi's Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate) in 1947. Toshirō Mifune, the famous actor who later starred in most of Kurosawa's films, first met Kurosawa at a pre-screening of this movie.

On 22 June 1948 a concerto by Fumio Hayasaka was premiered in Tokyo with Hiroshi Kajiwara as soloist on the grand piano and the Toho Symphony Orchestra (today's Tokyo Symphony Orchestra) under Masashi Ueda.