Masaru Satô(1928-1999)
- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
The youngest of six brothers, all of them music lovers, Masaru Sato
decided early in life that he wanted to be a composer. His models were
two other composers born, as he was, on the northernmost Japanese
island of Hokkaido: Akira Ifukube and Fumio Hayasaka. "To me", Sato
said, "they were like gods". After hearing Hayasaka's score for
Rashomon (1950), Sato decided Hayasaka was the only one he wanted for
his teacher. He absorbed much of Hayasaka's modernist leanings, and
grew to know Hayasaka's best friend Akira Kurosawa during this period.
The year 1955 was a vast turning point for Sato: after scoring numerous
insignificant pictures for various studios in Tokyo, Sato won the
assignment for Gojira no Gyakushu (1955). Then his teacher Fumio
Hayasaka died tragically young, while finishing the score for
Kurosawa's Ikimono no Kiroku (1955). Sato stepped in to complete the
score, uncredited. Kurosawa was sufficiently pleased with Sato to use
him for all his pictures for the following ten years. Though the two
had a falling-out after Akahige (1965), Sato remained one of Japan's
most in-demand film composers, returning to the Gojira series several
times and remaining a favorite of many other directors such as Kihachi
Okamoto and June Fukuda. After scoring Dun-Huang in 1987, Sato had to
call a brief halt to his career in order to tend to family interests in
real estate in his native Hokkaido; but within a few years, the
problems were wrapped up, and Sato was able to go back to film
composing full time, at last reaching and surpassing his 300th movie
score. Sato is almost unique among Japan's prolific film composers in
that he has written extensively for his chosen field, but has never
written for the concert stage.