Fumio Hayasaka

During his roughly 15-year-long career, Fumio Hayasaka composed scores for some of the biggest names in Japanese cinema and was regarded by many as the finest Japanese film composer alive. Many of his scores were written for no less a cinematic luminary than Akira Kurosawa, including the legendary director's breakthrough multiple-perspective masterpiece "Rashomon" (1950). The brilliant composer's career was sadly cut short by tuberculosis in 1955, but his influence lives on not only in the still-watched films that bear his musical mark, but also in the work of the pupils he groomed as his successors. One such protégé, Masuru Sato, completed the score for Kurosawa's "I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being" (1955), the project on which Hayasaka was working at the time of his death. Sato went on to provide scores for a substantial portion of Kurosawa's subsequent films. Another composer whose career owes a debt to Hayasaka is Akira Ifukube, whose work has enhanced the dramatic effect of many a "Godzilla" motion picture. It was Hayasaka who recommended Ifukube to Toho Studios.