As a child in postwar Tokyo, Haruomi Hosono went to see the 1956 Hollywood blockbuster “Around the World in 80 Days,” which included a scene set in the port city of Yokohama.
“But it was a Yokohama or Japan that I had never seen before, and that felt very interesting,” recalled Hosono. “The perspective of Hollywood toward Japan felt very unique, very new. I felt it could be fun to look at Tokyo in a similar way.”
For more than 50 years — with his bands Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra, as well as through dozens of projects on his own and as a producer — Hosono has been one of global pop’s most ingenious and provocative forces. His vast and varied career has encompassed earnest folk-rock in the Neil Young vein, tongue-in-cheek easy listening and neon-bright computerized pop that made him, uncomfortably, a celebrity in the go-go era of 1980s Japan.
A primary architect of contemporary Japanese pop, Hosono was long a cult figure in the West. That has gradually changed in recent years with endorsements from major acts like Harry Styles and Vampire Weekend, who drew inspiration from Hosono’s mix of quirky experimentation and handmade intimacy.
Cameron Winter, of the band Geese, said he was enticed by Hosono’s border-crossing style after encountering it online as a teenager.
“I think his music responds very well to the internet, and vice versa,” Winter said. “He can just make weird ideas feel so good and so sweet.”
At 79, Hosono is making his biggest push in the West in decades. On Sept. 11, he will release his latest left-turn solo album, “Yours Sincerely,” a suite of prayerful lullabies set to bubbling electronics and soft guitars, and even classical influences. It’s a lane change from the American roots music that for decades has been his central fascination. This month, he will play at Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.
His new album began, appropriately enough, with a puzzle over translation.
In the aftermath of Covid isolation, and troubled by news of constant global tumult, Hosono turned to themes of kindness and motherly love, the balms of humankind. He focused on a Japanese word, omoiyari, often translated as compassion or empathy.
“But that didn’t really fit with my feeling,” Hosono recalled in a video interview from his studio in Tokyo, looking like an average retiree in his paperboy cap and drab polo shirt. Speaking through an interpreter, he said he settled on the English word sincerely, with its suggestion of intimate correspondence.
It didn’t hurt that the word also brought him back to “Sincerely,” the 1954 doo-wop hit by the Moonglows, an imported nugget from Hosono’s youth. But something wasn’t quite right there, either. “I just felt the lyrics were a bit too ’50s,” and too focused on romantic flirtation, he said. So he wrote new Japanese verses: “I want you to hear this song of joy,” Hosono sings in a dry, almost whispered baritone, over Brazilian jazz chords on his acoustic guitar.
“There’s a lot of uneasy situations occurring every day in the world,” Hosono added. “But such a universal thing that is love could be a guidance for humanity.”
BORN IN 1947, at the peak of the postwar American occupation of Japan, Hosono was part of a generation that grew up immersed in Western pop culture, and thrilled to the sounds of Benny Goodman and boogie-woogie. “There really was no rhythm in Japanese music back then,” Hosono said.
After performing covers of songs from the Ventures on the teenage “danpa” (dance party) circuit, by about 1970 Hosono had become a key player in Japan’s burgeoning rock scene. Happy End, the Buffalo Springfield-inspired band in which he played bass and sometimes sang, revolutionized Japanese rock by singing in the native tongue — rather than English — and by wrestling with concepts of national identity as Japan was rapidly being rebuilt.
In late 1972, Happy End recorded in Los Angeles with Van Dyke Parks, the Brian Wilson collaborator whose solo album that year, “Discover America,” looked at American music from a refracted, outsider’s point of view.
Even the basics of their encounter are disputed in the haze of rock ’n’ roll memory. According to Parks, four shaggy Japanese men interrupted him in the studio, saying they wanted his help capturing the “Burbank sound.” “My God, what does that mean?” Parks recalled thinking. Hosono has told a totally different version. In his telling, a drunken Parks barged in on them.
The experience offered Hosono a valuable studio education but left the group feeling stranded in a nether zone between cultures. Parks and his partner, Lowell George of the band Little Feat, easily grasped Happy End’s American-inflected sound but had no idea what they were saying.
“In Japan, it was the other way around,” Hosono said. “People were like, ‘We understand what you’re singing about, but we don’t get your music.’” Before splitting up, the band recorded a song about the conundrum: “Sayonara America, Sayonara Japan.”
Back in Japan, Hosono became a top producer and session player, coming to see himself less as a musician than a dexterous artisan. His craft could be idiosyncratic, indulging New Orleans rhythms and old-time country songwriting with what Jim O’Rourke, an American experimental musician who has lived and worked in Japan for decades, called an exceptional degree of skill.
“With a lot of people, the influences are on their sleeve,” O’Rourke said. “With Hosono, it was on his fantastically well-made, bespoke jacket sleeve.”
On a series of mid-70s solo albums like “Bon Voyage Co.” and “Tropical Dandy,” Hosono began developing a playfully postmodern vision: a gumbo of rootsy Americana, traditional Okinawan vocals and a semi-satirical embrace of the midcentury “exotica” genre and its cartoonish stereotypes of Asian music.
In 1978, Hosono recruited two expert musicians — Ryuichi Sakamoto, a keyboardist with academic training in composition, and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi — to take this approach a giant step into the future. As Yellow Magic Orchestra, or YMO, the trio was a Japanese take on Kraftwerk’s pure electronica, but with a subversive edge on tracks like “Firecracker,” a cascading remake of Martin Denny, the king of tiki-lounge mood music. Sakamoto, who would go on to become an Oscar-winning composer, once described the band’s mix of styles as a “bento box.”
YMO toured the United States, even appearing on “Soul Train,” and the group became a phenomenon in Japan, vying with baby-faced J-pop idols for top chart positions. After its breakup in 1983, Hosono kept evolving, through ambient electronics, experimental albums with the American producer Bill Laswell and nostalgic comfort stops in R&B and country.
If there is a common thread in his work, it may be the sense of an oblique perspective on American music, or of being one signal in a global feedback loop. Parks believes that perspective is too rare.
“Hosono is the ticket to ride,” he said. “He has made a career out of this transcultural understanding, that ability to climb out of the box and embrace the interpretive powers of how we are perceived.”
Parks added, “It’s not just ‘America first,’ after all.”
SITTING IN A CORNER of his studio, Hosono was surrounded by American memorabilia: a Laurel and Hardy poster, books about old-time radio and the oddball composer Raymond Scott. On the wall was a gorgeous Navajo textile that Hosono found at a high-end Tokyo department store. “It was quite cheap, actually,” he said with a sly smile.
American music from the first half of the 20th century may still be Hosono’s driving force. On his last brief American tour, in 2019, one of the first songs on the set list was “Tutti Frutti” — not Little Richard’s hit, but a 1930s jazz novelty with the same title.
“Yours Sincerely” veers far from that style, with soft notes on the marimba and iwabue, a traditional Japanese stone flute, as well as shadings of danger on the margins.
The opening track, “Note of Mothership,” has a chorus of children and women — among them Hosono’s daughter, Aya — singing “We are mothers” in strongly accented English, over twinkling bells. The sci-fi connotations of “mothership” are deliberate: The kids and moms chirp amid a surreal soundscape of ticking and Hosono’s processed “alien voice,” like a vintage “Twilight Zone” cue.
Hosono also pulls from classical music. In “Figlio Perduto” (“Lost Child”), he follows the lead of the pop-classical soprano Sarah Brightman by adapting the Allegretto movement from Beethoven’s Seventh, with marimba and acoustic guitar. Brightman incorporated Italian lyrics about protecting children from harm; Hosono added his own, in Japanese.
When asked about the Beethoven quotation, Hosono pointed to a bust of the orchestral titan — captured in his characteristic scowl — that Hosono said had belonged to his grandfather, and that has been a studio mascot for years.
“I always felt that it sounded more like pop music than a classic,” Hosono said of the symphony. While working in the studio, he imagined that the statue’s frozen frown “gradually became something more soft and warm and kind.”
As a granddaddy of 20th-century Japanese pop, Hosono has finally been getting his due in the West, with younger musicians eagerly acknowledging his influence. In 2019, Vampire Weekend sampled an electronic track that Hosono made in the ’80s for the Japanese retailer Muji. Three years later, Styles said his Grammy-winning album “Harry’s House” had been named after Hosono’s classic 1973 solo debut, “Hosono House.”
“Yours Sincerely,” and his American tour, would seem a ripe opportunity for Hosono to solidify his legacy. But he has long been ambivalent about fame, and he was elliptical when addressing his aims for “Yours Sincerely,” saying only that, in 2026, he felt a strong desire to express his message of omoiyari. “I think my heart beats faster than my music,” he said.
I asked Hosono how he felt about the acclaim he’s receiving from Western artists and audiences.
“Simply put, it’s too late,” Hosono stated bluntly, adding that his body “is not moving as it used to.” At his request, this interview was broken up into two parts to give him time to rest. Sakamoto and Takahashi, his comrades in YMO, both died in 2023.
Then Hosono recalled that Styles had come to visit him in his studio. (Through a spokesman, Styles declined to comment.) What did they talk about? “I can’t remember,” Hosono said.
“But I had a big impression,” Hosono added, “that he was such a nice person.”
