Kenjirô Hirose

A songwriter at Columbia Records in the 1950s, where one of his friends and collaborators was the moonlighting Toho screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa, Hirose was one of many who made the jump to scoring films. Although pigeonholed in low-budget crime and comedy movies, Hirose shortly made a name for himself as the composer-songwriter-hitmaker for the first movies in the Young Guy (Wakadaisho) series. His reputation as a hitmaker also promoted Daiei to hire him to score Gamera vs. Viras (Gamera tai Uchu kaiju Bairasu, 1968), which required a theme song. Hirose's peppy tune was retained in the American version of the film, and heard in all the subsequent pictures through 1971. Unlike many pop musicians who made a career in film scoring, Hirose was equally at home in any genre he tackled, and made the most of budgets more minuscule than were given to bigger "name" composers like Akira Ifukube or Masaru Sato. Although largely known for the Wakadaisho films and the Gamera song (parodied on US TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000), Hirose also provided spare and intriguing scores for crime films like Sadao Nakajima's Bodo shimane keimusho, Jun Fukuda's The Weed of Crime, and Ishiro Honda's Shinko no otoko. As well, he acted as Japanese music advisor to John Williams on Frank Sinatra's 1965 film None But the Brave, and orchestrated and conducted Maury Laws' scores to The Last Dinosaur (1977) and The Bermuda Depths (1978).