Interview by Cassandra Murnieks

Hiroyuki Takashima was the most influential man in the Japanese music industry during the 20th and 21st century. At 75 years of age his musical career spans over 50 of those years and he was responsible for The Beatles success in Japan. Takashima always had a penchant for music, ever since he was a child. He recalls a moment during World War II in 1945, when he was 14, where his family home was flattened after a bomb attack. The young boy was running through burnt fields and being shot at from a plane. At the end of the war he didn’t feel sadness or sorrow, but knew he could sleep at night.

After the war Takashima got involved with a High School play. When he played “Schumann Traumerei,” it brought the crowd to tears due to the raw emotion. It was at that moment he knew that he wanted to get involved in music. Initially he wanted to be a Stage Director with the new-wave theatre scene that existed in Japan at the time. He went to Waseda University and graduated with a degree in literature, specializing in theatre performance in 1957.

In 1959 Takashima began working at Tokyo Shibaura Denki in the recording division (later known as Toshiba EMI Limited and currently known as EMI Music Japan Inc). Takashima also handled American based record label Kapp which Roger Williams and Brian Hyland were under. Hyland’s catchy hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” became well known under a Japanese title and is still used in TV advertisements in Japan. Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and The Cascades were other Western acts that he looked after.

But a song landed on Takashima’s desk at the end of 1962 that would change music forever. The song was “Love Me Do” by The Beatles.

He remembers that, “At the time most western singers were solo and in Jazz it was chorus groups. The exception was the Everly Brothers, who sang and played instruments. I could listen to 2 or 3 seconds of a song and be able to predict if it could be a hit.” (more…)