The Colorful Music of Ichiko Hashimoto

• Author: Adam Wescott

• Editor: Trent Cannon

Music is central to the anime series RahXephon. The titular robot seeks the power to “tune the world” while its enemies, the stone Dolem, are named after musical notation and attack by song. The show’s soundtrack lives up to its central motif. Legendary anime composer Yoko Kanno provided the theme song, sung by voice actor Maya Sakamoto. Meanwhile, Ichiko Hashimoto scored the soundtrack and ending theme. Hashimoto’s music spans three hours across three CDs, not including the film Pluritas Concentio. It’s comparable in scope to Yoko Kanno’s similarly massive soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop.

These days, most anime fans would recognize Kanno’s name before Hashimoto, thanks to the former’s work on popular anime series including Macross Plus, Escaflowne and Wolf’s Rain. Her music for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is just as iconic as Kenji Kawai’s score for the film. Meanwhile, Hashimoto has only ever scored one other anime, the Code Geass spin-off Akito the Exiled. A decade separates these two series; Hashimoto has not composed for anime since the last episode of Akito in 2015.

While I was researching RahXephon for Anime Herald, I discovered Hashimoto’s career was far more extensive than I thought. First of all, she’s a sporadic voice actor. She played the protagonist’s mom in RahXephon, a complex and sympathetic villain role. Many years later, she made an appearance in 2012 cult classic Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Miine,  voicing yet another villainous mother. Hashimoto was also featured in the Fujiko Miine spoken word theme song “New Wuthering Heights.”

You have to leave the boundaries of the anime industry to see the full picture of Ichiko Hashimoto’s career. She has released over 20 albums since 1981. Her most recent, “View,” came out in 2021. You can find it streaming today together with “duo,” her 2016 collaboration with bossa nova guitarist Yoshiro Nakamura, and her 1992 album “Romantic na Ame.” My recommendation to you, though, would be to seek out her very first album from 1981: “Colored Music.”

Hashimoto and her frequent collaborator Atsuo Fujimoto first met as “replacement band members” playing Yellow Magic Orchestra’s first Japanese tour.  The two of them hit it off and decided to make an album together. That album was “Colored Music,” which took inspiration from jazz and funk pioneers Sly & the Family Stone and Miles Davis. “Colored Music” is an excellent if unconventional album featuring off-kilter sounds and instrumentation. Tracks swing from jazz to disco and early deep house. My family, for whom I played this album en route to a natural park, told me that it “sounded like it was written by aliens.” To me it sounds like sparks flying in endless, voluminous space.

“Colored Music” was released under Better Days, a sub-label of Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd. Its peers included the likes of Japanese reggae album “Pecker Power”, MARIAH’s 1983 classic “Utakata no Hibi” and – of course – Ryuuichi Sakamoto’s “Thousand Knives.” Better Days captures a moment in time in which Japanese musicians looked abroad for influence. Pecker befriended Bob Marley. Sakamoto collaborated on a film with David Bowie. The guitar riff in “Too Much Money,” a track from “Colored Music,” is seemingly ripped straight from “Take Me to the River” by the Talking Heads.

“Colored Music,” though, represented just one side of Ichiko Hashimoto’s interests. Another side is represented by her self-titled 1984 album “Ichiko.” “Ichiko” exchanges eccentric sonic texturing for spare piano and a melancholy fall atmosphere. Hashimoto’s vocals intrude only rarely, like a creak in the eves of a very old house. “Ichiko” bears the mark of Satie and Debussy. In a piece for Vulture, Andy Beta points to the screening of the 1963 film Le Feu Follet, and its inclusion of Satie’s music, as an inflection point in Japanese pop culture. By the 1980s, a “Satie boom” was in full swing.

As “Colored Music” represented the spirit of the Better Days sub-label, “Ichiko” is a product of JVC’s Music Interior sub-label. Music Interior distributed so-called “environmental music,” designed for ambient rather than active listening.  Artts like Hashimoto, Yoshio Suzuki and Masahide Sakuma sought to emulate Satie’s repetitive “furniture music.” This did not mean that Hashimoto and her peers were unambitious. If anything, they were propelled to take greater risks by the bubble economy of the 1980s. This was an era in which Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haroumi Hosono composed “Watering a Flower” specifically to be listened to in MUJI department stores. 

Today Better Days and Music Interior have faded into the past. While Ryuuichi Sakamoto and his fellow Yellow Magic Orchestra performers have been canonized, artists at a degree of separation like Hashimoto remain just out of the limelight. That just means, though, that they’re ripe for re-discovery by music experts. One such expert is Chee Shimizu, a DJ who runs the Tokyo record shop Organic Music. Shimizu has championed Hashimoto’s work for years; he featured “Colored Music” in his 2013 book “Obscure Sound.”  (It was last revised in 2020.) In 2016 he masterminded a “club edit” vinyl of 2 songs from “Colored Music.” 

Shimizu and his peers have spent the last few years in search of wamono, vintage Japanese pop music. It’s a craze that existed long before “city pop” fandom in the United States. Daisuke Ito at Resident Advisor traces back to at least the 1980s, when “comic artist Takashi Nemoto and music critic Manabu Yuasa started reissuing a slew of obscure, out-of-print kayo kyoku (old Japanese pop) records.” Today, DJs outside Japan search the country’s musical history for valuable deep cuts. Wamono represents an opportunity to rediscover and recontextualize past masterpieces and their creators.

Japanese ambient music in the vein of Music Interior has undergone its own renaissance over the past few years. YouTube algorithms have pointed international fans in the direction of Hosono’s “Watering a Flower”. Meanwhile, musicians like Portland’s Spencer Doran continue to champion the genre. “Ichiko” remains comparatively obscure by comparison. But Hashimoto’s work might very well be embraced in the same way as new cult classics “Through the Looking Glass” and “Utakata no Hibi.”

Ichiko Hashimoto’s music has never sounded like the past to me. Albums like “Colored Music” look to the future as much as they rummage for parts through multiple genres. Hashimoto could play and sing bossa nova, but she could also play Satie. Even in recent years, where she has settled as a “jazz pianist,” she continues to stretch herself and try new things in her albums. The RahXephon soundtrack encompasses her extraordinary range. But that soundtrack is only just a part of what Hashimoto gave us.

I’ve seen folks express frustration in the past at anime fandom’s presentist bias. I agree, and yet I think the existence of folks like Ichiko Hashimoto point to something more fundamental. Hashimoto is not so much an “anime composer” as she is a composer who passed through the anime industry. She’s also a musician with decades of experience that has contributed to at least two vibrant cultural movements in the history of Japan’s music scene. It’s really the anime industry that should be grateful to have had her, even if for a brief moment.