Japanese Music Industry
George Azuma remembered growing up in Tokyo and having many opportunities to play rock and roll along with his brother and several childhood friends. After high school, George attended college in the United States where he continued to play music. He returned to Japan where he continued to play...
Hitoshi Fukutome has enjoyed a long and interesting career at the Yamaha Corporation. He joined Yamaha in 1982 and has served in many roles for the company over the years including Manager of the Piano Division in Europe in 1990 and as president of Yamaha Music in Austria five years later. His...
Yoshi Kobayashi began working for Yamaha Corporation of America in 1958. In the early days of his career he was tasked with supervising the import and export of the motorcycle division. As the musical instrument side of the company grew and expanded into the United States, Yoshi-san was placed in...
Hideo Kamimoto wrote the book on guitar repair! He built his first guitar in the late 1950s and soon discovered he had a true passion as a luthier. Within a decade he opened H. Kamimoto Instrument Repairs in Oakland, California. By this time Hideo was also repairing other string instruments...
Mac Yasuda played country music at an early age and fell in love with the style. He organized a band in Japan dedicated to country music. As his audiences grew, Mac was being asked more and more about where they too could get the type of guitars he was playing. He soon began dealing in musical...
Wayne Tanabe is a pioneer in the band instrument repair field who has helped create and improve several methods for instrument cleaning using ultrasound and cryogenics. Looking towards ways of cleaning band instruments without harming the horn, Wayne began experimenting with deep freezing the...
Toshio Akiyama is an internationally renowned figure widely known for his contribution as the "father of the Japanese wind bands." Having received his education at the famous Eastman School of Music, USA, Mr. Akiyama returned to become the Vice- President of the All-Japan Band Association from 1961...
Yuichiro Yokouchi was once referred to as "the world's largest guitar maker" by a music magazine, a tag line he has liked to use over the years. His OEM guitar factory in Japan was responsible for over 15,000 guitars a month at the peek of the Beatle boom of the 1960s. He attended his first NAMM...
Hidekazu Tanaka became the fourth president of the Roland Corporation in Japan in 2005. The role within the company followed nearly 25 years of service within the company including working in sales, marketing and the export division. The company has been a source of great instrument innovation...
Chieko Nakamura is the CEO for Jujiya Musical Instrument Company in Ginza, Tokyo. The harp and flute retailer is also known by the shorter name Ginza Jujiya. The company was established in 1874 by her great grandfather. The company's early focus was on reed organs and in fact they produced their...