Make Believe Mailer #143: Kunihiko Murai (2021)

A Lost Interview With A Japanese Music Legend

From a compilation capturing some of his work

At some point in 2021, I had an idea that I thought could be amazing without thinking of all the work it would require. Fresh off the success of The Japan Times’ “Recultured” podcast — a look at how COVID-19 transformed Japanese pop culture¹ written and reported out largely by me — images of audio breakthroughs danced in my head. Forget that this prior project involved half a dozen people and there would be no way I could do something by myself…I was high on doing a thing, and fully confident I could do it again, just me. I paid for a premium account to an audio recording app² and set my sights on my next subject — the history of Alfa Records, one of the most important record labels in Japanese music history. 

Ultimately, I botched this project pretty early on — this might have marked the last time I thought “I can do anything!” and served as a transition into a more relaxed “I know what I’m actually capable” period carrying on today. Yet I did manage to get one big interview for this imagined project — Alfa Records founder and all-around fascinating industry figure Kunihiko Murai. He’s probably best known for being a pivotal player in assembling and especially bringing Yellow Magic Orchestra to the world, the first time a Japanese group truly broke out on the global stage.

Somehow, despite only having an idea, this interview came together in 2021…and really was just like one of what I imagined would be six or seven chats about his time in the Japanese music industry. That didn’t happen, as I became bogged down with work that actually pays the bills and realized “oh, right, I’m bad at non-writing stuff.” This hour-long chat with Murai languished on my computer, mostly reminding me of a personal failure and being something I didn’t want to revisit.

Then YMO’s legacy started becoming even bigger. The deaths of Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto gave people a reminder of just how vital the project was for electronic music. Japanese music…long overlooked globally…started gaining momentum worldwide, reminding of everything YMO accomplished when they pushed into foreign territories. Last week, Music Awards Japan made YMO the symbol of the whole event, complete with the above video celebrating their legacy.

Murai played a vital role in any of this happening. Ironically, revisiting this interview, we barely talked about YMO. I clearly expected that to be a topic of discussion for the future in this grand series, so I didn’t push for it here. Instead, I learned about everything that came before, and how he became the type of person who would want to push Japanese music to the world…a revolutionary idea then, and something that feels much more pronounced today.

So…here’s a lost interview with Kunihiko Murai, one of the most important behind-the-scenes names in Japanese music history. The podcast he was supposed to be central to never materialized, but I’m still happy I could chat with him for this to learn about his history, the importance of Italian restaurants to Japanese entertainment, being Hiroshi Sato’s roommate, and much more.

MAKE BELIEVE MELODIES: First off, for recording purposes, could I have you introduce yourself?

KUNIHIKO MURAI: My name is Kuni Murai. I was born in 1945, so I'm 76 years old. I started the music publishing company in 1969. It is called Alfa Music. And then I ran Alfa for almost like 20 years, and then we started a recording studio, record production company, and finally a record company, Alfa Records, in the late 70s, I think. The biggest artist we had for Alfa was Yellow Magic Orchestra.

I am also a composer. I started writing hit songs in 1967, and before, I was running a record shop, so my interest was always in music. So I enjoyed producing, writing, you know, running a record company. And now I'm almost retired, you know, 76 years old. You can’t travel too much. But I'm still interested in music, and also, after pandemic, I'm very much interested in writing stories, so now I'm a kind of a writer [laughing], writing a story and it's published on internet.

Oh that’s awesome. I’m curious, could you tell me a little bit about where you are now?

Yeah, yeah, this is my house in Los Angeles, in West Hollywood. I moved to this house some 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago, because I had a lot of business with people living in Los Angeles, because the first contact with American music industry people was Lester Sill. He was the boss of Phil Spector [laughs]. And when I saw him for the first time in 1970, he was the president of Screen Gems Columbia. Back then it was Columbia Pictures’ music publishing division. And so I started coming here, coming to Los Angeles, and then…my best friend in the music industry is Abe Somer, a famous music lawyer. And actually I live right next door to Abe Somer’s house [laughs].

Wow, that’s nice.

We’re still friends, and we enjoy talking about the things which we did together in the past. So I decided to move to Los Angeles in the early ‘90s because in those days I had a company called NAM, and we published Fleetwood Mac, B.B. King, you know, those copyrights. And so I moved to Los Angeles, and I'm still staying here, and my kids grew up here, and my wife loves it here, so I still live here.

I’m from Los Angeles so I get it, that draw³. So today I’m interested in the history of Alfa Records, though especially the kind of pre-history of it. In the ‘60s you mentioned you were working in a record store and also writing all these songs…all these hits. What was your life like before the 1970s?

The ‘60s…wow. It starts with the Olympic Games in 1964, the Tokyo Olympic Games. And then, I think in those days, Japan recovered from, from the I uh, how can I say this? Well, I was born 1945, and I was born in March, so there were many air raids on Tokyo, and maybe half a million people died. And when I grew up in Tokyo, there were so many buildings destroyed. So we had nothing, you know, in the 1940s [laughs]. By the ‘60s, Japan achieved the great success in rebuilding the economy. People used to work so hard, amazingly hard [to rebuild]. But on the other hand, Japan got richer. People became more interested in art, music, you know, lots of things like that. And I was growing up in those, you know, good days of Japan when we could enjoy music and and movies and baseball [laughs] all those kind of things.

So basically, the people in the ‘60s were very happy and active. There are some minuses also, like pollution [laughs]. Dark sky, I remember. It's like a 1970s Los Angeles. Yellow sky. I remember so and the musically, What? What? Yeah, Beatles game, that's a big, big event. Who else came? Rock movement started in in San Francisco, you know, in London, and then Japanese people started playing rock music before it was jazz music. And then there were Patrick, you may know, group sounds. It's a kind of a boys band. The lifespan of those groups was very short like two or three years, but they needed a writer who could write songs for them. I was in a jazz band and I could write songs, so I wrote for groups like The Tigers, The Tempters, The Spiders. All those people. That’s how I started writing music.

How did you break into that space?

Well, I became friends with a record producer named Masaharu Honjo who worked for Philips Records in Japan. He was one of the biggest producers for group sounds and contemporary Japanese pop music in the 1960 and ‘70s. We went to the same school, Keio University, and he was a classical fan and I was a jazz fan. But we had mutual friends, so we could connect. And he is the guy who asked me to write a song for The Tempters. He took me to clubs and venues. I’m a jazz fan, so I didn’t know about those bands and places. We recorded many many songs for The Tempters and other group sounds groups. Most of the time they couldn’t read music, so I had to teach them what chords to play [laughs]. We spent a lot of time in the studio together, Honjo and I, and that’s how we came to make so many hits of group sounds.

You had to be a professor too, teaching these guys to play, that’s amazing. I’d love to learn more about what these clubs and livehouses in the '60s were like.

Oh those clubs…I remember the famous club called ACB in Ginza. A really really small club, maybe for 200 people. And the girls…it was fully packed by girls. Girls only! [laughs] It was amazing. There was another one called Drum in Ikebukuro. The same thing…it was a great experience to be there.

Sixty years later, I went to a show done by The Tigers, the biggest group sounds band. And those girls, who were like teens in the ‘60s, they were 65 or 70…but were screaming and clapping like they were back in the 1960s. [laughs]

Truly hardcore fans. On the topic of important venues in Tokyo, another place in the late ‘60s that sounded important after reading some articles about you was an Italian restaurant called Chianti in Nishi-Azabu. The way you were talking about it in this magazine interview, you were saying how it attracted so many prominent people — actors, comedians and musicians, complete with an international feel, which I think left an impact on you. How did those experiences shape your ambitions?

So Chianti was founded by my friends’ father and mother. Their names were Shiro Kawazoe and Kaji Kawazoe. They had two sons. One was Shoro Kawazoe, who became a producer with Alfa Records, directly in charge with Yellow Magic Orchestra. I started going to Chianti when it opened in 1960. I was 15 or 16 years old.

Basically, this restaurant was made for Mr. and Mrs. Kawazoe to see their friends. Not only Japanese artists, but also international ones. Shirley MacLaine was there, Steve Parker was there, the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent was there. I used to see all these great international artists. They attracted lots of interesting Japanese artists too. I saw the great composer Toshiro Mayuzumi. Great architects, and so many wonderful creators were there. I was very much influenced by those people.

In 1969, Mr. Kawazoe sent Shoro, his son, and myself to Paris to do the recording for a Japanese artist who was a member of The Tigers, Kahashi Katsumi, nicknamed Topo. Those days, I met many interesting French producers, owners of record companies, music publishers…I became friends with them. Most of them were from Eddie Barclay’s record company. He was the owner of Barclay Record, and he was the hottest record guy in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I started Alfa Music because Eddie Barclay’s publishing division wanted me to start a music publishing company to publish their songs. I bought a song from them, it was a French hit song that was eventually bought by Paul Anka and he put English lyrics on it. It became “My Way.” That was Alfa Music’s first music copyright. It all starts from Chianti. [laughs]

Yes, this “My Way”

Was that trip to Paris your first time leaving the country?

Oh yeah, that was my first time! I knew about the happenings in foreign countries because I had some friends in France and in the United States, who told me that going there was a totally different thing. I was so excited when I arrived in Paris. I couldn’t sleep for three days. Everything I’d see was so fantastic! [laughs] Every dish I ate was so good.

What were your early challenges with Alfa Music?

I didn’t feel any pressure, or face any challenges really. I don’t know the reason. It went so fast and so successful. In 1970, I went to Los Angeles and became the sub-publisher for Screen Gems Columbia. They published Carole King’s Tapestry album, all these big hits. And in Japan they were published by Alfa. We didn’t suffer any financial problems. It went very, very well.

At this point your mostly working with international artists and companies, but I did want to know, for context, what was the Japanese music industry like in the early 1970s?

The industry was very old fashioned. [laughs] For example, they had six channel, while in France and Hollywood I saw 24 channel, 38 channel recording equipment. It was totally different. Alfa was a very fashionable company in those days. [laughs] So all those people I met internationally were interested in working with Alfa because other record companies were run by older people. [laughs] They were boring to speak with. Many of them were from different types of companies, so they didn’t know anything about music. [laughs] Not all of course, there were some great music producers and people, but generally when it came to companies, it could be old fashioned.

That would have been my guess on how the industry operated. So you’re a young guy going around the world, seeing all these exciting developments in international music. Correct me if I’m wrong, but by this point in time very little Japanese music had ever tried to go out into the broader world.

Yeah. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to introduce Japanese music to the world market. Like Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records. He introduced the music of Jamaica to the world. I wanted to send Japanese artists to international arenas.

At the start of the ‘70s, what artists were capturing your attention, who did you think could indeed go out into the world?

Musically, [Haruomi] Hosono helped release really important albums like Kazemachi Roman in the early ‘70s, among other works. I was extremely interested in Hosono’s music. Luckily, he used to come to Chianti restaurant. So we became friends. I invited him to produce recording by Yumi Arai — eventually known as Yuming — and he worked on her first album. We kept talking about doing something together, and finally we made Yellow Magic Orchestra. I thought Hosono’s music had big potential internationally in the early ‘70s.

Do you have any good memories or stories of getting to know Hosono in the early ‘70s?

Yeah, yeah. I met Hosono at the house of Mr. Kawazoe, the owner of Chianti. It was very late at night, like two or three in the morning. He was with Chu Kosaka, who was in the musical Hair as an actor at the time. Hosono and Kosaka were good friends…they still are⁴. Hosono, Kosaka and I were having tea or coffee early in the morning, and Shoro was there. He’s a flamenco player, and he owned a really nice flamenco guitar. He let Hosono play it, and he played it in his way. The music was so fantastic. That’s how I found him. [laughs] I loved his music from the beginning.

A late-night flamenco session will do that.

He played some popular songs with flamenco guitar.

At this point, Alfa is more of a publishing company. When did it enter your mind that you could make it into more of a label, especially in relation to Japanese music?

In the early 1970s, I opened a recording studio. There weren’t many good recording studios in Japan back in those days. So I invited the architect engineers from Los Angeles to make a space almost exactly similar to the A&M Records studio, the Motown Studio, that kind of thing. It was quite new for Tokyo. Then I started the record production company called Alfa And Associates. At the same time, Shoro started a company called Mushroom Record, with Mickey Curtis and some other people. The two companies merged, and became Alfa Records in the late 1970s.

How did artists respond to the studio you built?

The studio, Hosono and Yuming was the greatest blend. It worked perfectly. The atmosphere there helped create her debut album, Hikoki Gumo. That record inspired others to try out this new way of recording. Minako Yoshida followed, Hiroshi Sato followed. Lots of musically exciting things were happening in the new studio. That lead to making the record company.

At this point, part of me just wants to ask you how you met every single person you’ve mentioned. [laughs] How’d you get to know Minako Yoshida?

This is another interesting thing, actually. Owning the studio, sometimes people rent the studio to do the recording. So I’d see lots of musicians in the studio, even if they weren’t with Alfa. I saw Ryuichi Sakamoto working in the studio, and Minako Yoshida and even Tatsuro Yamashita were singing background chorus. Like “ahhhhhhhhh!” [laughs] I got to know all those people in the studio.

It’s always funny to hear details like that because for people discovering this older Japanese music today, they look at Yamashita or Yoshida as superstars…but here they are in the ‘70s as backup singers. That always blows peoples’ minds. How about Hiroshi Sato?

When I did end up producing Minako Yoshida, she brought Hiroshi Sato with her. He just came from Osaka to Tokyo, and he didn’t even have a place to live. So I put him in my apartment, and he lived about three months with me. Every night I’d come back home, he’d play the tape that he recorded with Minako that day. [laughs] I love Sato’s music, so he became an Alfa artists.

Wow, that’s awesome. What was he like as a roommate?

He was a son of a monk! A Buddhist monk. For him…music was everything. He wasn’t interested in eating or drinking or having fun. He could be happy only with music, creating and playing. He was a very special guy.

All these artists you are talking about are now seen as some of the most important in Japanese music history, but I know at the time they could be quite overlooked. What was actually dominant in Japanese pop in the ‘70s domestically?

At the time, what they called “idol” was big. Momoe Yamaguchi was the biggest star in the ‘70s in Japan.

What did you think of idol music?

I wasn’t interested. [laughs]

Before Alfa becomes it’s own kind of independent label, there’s one other release that’s frequently cited as being important in Japanese music history. That’s Izumi Yukimura’s Super Generation. I believe you were involved in that one. How did that come together, working with this star who was big even before the ‘70s?

She was a huge star in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Me and Hosono produced the album you mentioned, working with the younger generation. Izumi sang songs by people like Ryoichi Hattori who, for me, was the best songwriter from the ‘40s to ‘60s. It was a collaboration between people from different generations, but loved a certain kind of music.

I decided to produce Yukimura, and I consulted with Hosono. He agreed to do the recording. The next question was “what kind of songs?” I said “why don’t we do the Hattori songs?” Everyone was onboard and we did the recording. I remember I wrote an arrangement for the overture, and Mr. Hattori liked it very much. I was so happy that he liked this new presentation of his music. I also remember we had a concert with Izumi and Hosono at NHK Hall, about 4000 people. Mr. Hattori was at the concert — in the orchestra — and Izumi introduced him from the stage. The spotlight hit him, and I remember that scene very well. I was so glad to literally spotlight the composer I loved. [laughs]

That’s so great to hear. To jump ahead a few years, Alfa Records starts later in the ‘70s. What were you doing differently in Japanese music that was working?

I cannot answer the question, because most of the things we did in the past were not based on any rational thoughts. [laughs] We just did what we wanted to do. That’s all.

What did you want to do musically?

I wanted to create something great from Japan that could be a big hit overseas.

So I started talking with Hosono about what to do. He was interested in sharing his music overseas. We tried a few things, and eventually landed on Yellow Magic Orchestra. He created something new, since it’s synthesizer music, and I thought there was potential to make it big internationally. I brought it to A&M Records, and the younger people were interested in it. It built from there. There’s not a lot of intention to what we did. Rather, it was about a flow. It all built up to the point where the record was released, and they promoted it and it broke in…Florida, I think. They brought YMO to the local disco and radio station, and it built from there, all the way to Europe and beyond.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Check out the Best Of 2025 Spotify Playlist here!

1. Honestly…we did even better than I remember, called a bunch of things that have truly bloomed since.

2. Partial inspiration for this post — this service auto-renewing in the last week.

3. I’m omitting here an extended chat we had about me, with Mr. Murai asking me about my own history going from LA to Chicago to Japan, and me basically jabbering about how I love California weather but hate driving.

4. Kosaka died in 2022 at the age of 73.