Haruomi Hosono

Haruomi Hosono was born July 9, 1947, in Minato, Tokyo. He is the grandson of Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese passenger to survive the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, a family story that has followed him throughout a career defined by absorbing outside influences and carrying them somewhere new.^[1]

He began performing as a bassist in the psychedelic rock band Apryl Fool before co-founding Happy End, the folk rock group credited with proving that rock music could be written and sung convincingly in Japanese. His 1973 debut solo album, Hosono House, opened a decades-long run through folk, exotica, and eventually electronic music.^[1]

In the late 1970s he formed Yellow Magic Orchestra with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, pairing synthesizers with accessible melody in a way that helped define synth-pop and later influenced techno, hip-hop, and electronic music well beyond Japan. Hosono has described that era's relationship with new technology as playful, comparing synthesizers to toys he and his bandmates were simply having fun with.^[2]

His influence has reached a new generation of Western musicians, including Vampire Weekend, Mac DeMarco, Cornelius, and Sam Gendel, who have sampled, covered, or cited his catalog, and Harry Styles has named him as an inspiration. In September 2026, at age 78, Hosono released his 23rd studio album, Yours Sincerely, his first collection of new original songs in about seven years, and returned to the United States for his first American concerts in seven years.^[2] He has said he drew a complete creative blank during the pandemic before writing the album, and has voiced unease about artificial intelligence in music even as he remains curious about new technology, describing his own working method with the Japanese phrase urushinuri shokunin, a lacquer craftsman who keeps polishing a piece of work toward a certain quality.^[3]