Akira Ifukube
Biography. Early years in Hokkaido. Akira Ifukube was born on 31 May 1914 in Kushiro, Japan as the third son of a police officer Toshimitsu Ifukube. The origins of this family can be traced back to at least the 7th century with the birth of Ifukibe-no-Tokotarihime. He was strongly influenced by the Ainu music as he spent his childhood (from age of 9 to 12) in Otofuke near Obihiro, where was with a mixed population of Ainu and Japanese. His first encounter with classical music occurred when attending secondary school in Sapporo city. Ifukube decided to  become a composer at the age of 14 after hearing a radio performance of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring", and also cited the music of Manuel de Falla as a major influence. Ifukube studied forestry at Hokkaido Imperial University in Sapporo and composed in his spare time, which prefigured a line of self-taught Japanese composers. His first piece was the piano solo, "Piano Suite" (later the title was changed to "Japan Suite", arranged for orchestra), dedicated to George Copeland who was living in Spain. Atsushi Miura, Ifukube's friend at the university, sent a letter to Copeland . Copeland replied, "It is wonderful that you listen my disc in spite of you living in Japan, the opposite side of the earth. I imagine you may compose music. Send me some piano pieces." Then Miura, who was not a composer, presented Ifukube and this piece to Copeland. Copeland promised to interpret it, but the correspondence was unfortunately stopped because of the Spanish Civil War. Ifukube's big break came in 1935, when his first orchestral piece "Japanese Rhapsody" won the first prize in an international competition for young composers promoted by Alexander Tcherepnin. The judges of that contest—Albert  Roussel, Jacques Ibert, Arthur Honegger, Alexandre Tansman, Tibor Harsányi, Pierre-Octave Ferroud, and Henri Gil-Marchex were unanimous in their selection of Ifukube as the winner. Ifukube studied modern Western composition while Tcherepnin was visiting Japan, and his "Piano Suite" received an honourable mention at the I.C.S.M. festival in Venice in 1938. "Japanese Rhapsody" was performed in Europe on a number of occasions in the late 1930s. On completing University, he worked as a forestry officer and lumber processor in Akkeshi, and towards the end of the Second World War was appointed by the Imperial Japanese Army to study the  elasticity and vibratory strength of wood. He suffered radiation exposure after carrying out x-rays without protection, a consequence of the wartime lead shortage. Thus, he had to abandon forestry work and became a professional composer and teacher. Ifukube spent some time in hospital due to the radiation exposure, and was startled one day to hear one of his own marches being played over the radio when General Douglas MacArthur arrived to formalize the Japanese surrender. From 1946 to 2006 in Tokyo. He taught at the Tokyo University of the Arts (formerly Tokyo Music School), during which period he composed  his first film score for "Snow Trail", released in 1947. Over the next fifty years, he would compose more than 250 film scores, the high point of which was his 1954 music for Ishirō Honda's Toho movie, "Godzilla". Ifukube also created Godzilla's trademark roar – produced by rubbing a resin-covered leather glove along the loosened strings of a double bass – and its footsteps, created by striking an amplifier box. Despite his financial success as a film composer, Ifukube's first love had always been his general classical work as a composer. In fact his compositions for the two  genres cross-fertilized each other. For example, he was to recycle his 1953 music for the ballet "Shaka", about how the young Siddhartha Gautama eventually became the Buddha, for Kenji Misumi's 1961 film "Buddha". Then in 1988 he reworked the film music to create his three-movement symphonic ode "Gotama the Buddha". Meanwhile, he had returned to teaching at the Tokyo College of Music, becoming president of the college the following year, and in 1987 retired to become head of the College's ethnomusicology department. He trained younger generation composers such as Kaoru Wada, Shigeyuki Imai, Satoshi Imai, Toshiro  Mayuzumi, Yasushi Akutagawa, Akio Yashiro, Teizo Matsumura, Sei Ikeno, Minoru Miki, Maki Ishii, and Yssimal Motoji. He also published "Orchestration", a 1,000-page book on theory, widely used among Japanese composers. He died in Tokyo at Meguro-ku Hospital of multiple organ dysfunction on 8 February in 2006, at the age of 91 and buried at the Ube shrine in Tottori. Honors. The Japanese government awarded Ifukube the Order of Culture. Subsequently, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class. Tribute. On May 31, 2021, Google celebrated the 107th anniversary of his birth with a Google Doodle