Taro's Blog

Although I pay full respect to our music giants like J.S. Bach, G.F. Handel, W.A. Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and others, I don’t consider them my heroes because they did not live at the same time as I. They were like a million light-years away. I think Heroes are people who live in the same generation. When I was a junior high school student, Brian May of Queen and Ritchie Blackmore of Rainbow were my music heroes. When I was a high school student, Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma were my music heroes. (Seiji Ozawa and his mentor, late Hideo Saito, were also my heroes briefly when I was pretending to be a conductor. Seiji’s book「ボクの音楽武者修行」 taught me what he felt like when he went abroad alone in the late 1950s/early 1960s.)

Brian influenced me in my interests in guitar-making and astronomy, and Ritchie influenced me in my interest in baroque music. I loved the way Mstislav held his cello. It was so cool! I tried to emulate him, but I could not. For a long time, that was a mystery. Later, I found the reason. I mistakenly believed the Russian master was a tall man. I imagined his cello’s endpin was very, very, long. Later, I learned that he was a short man, thus he could hold his cello that way. Initially, I thought Yo-Yo was French (because he was born in Paris, France), but later I learned he was an American. Anyway, in the 1980s, there was no K-pop. Unlike a typical Asian stereotype of perfectionists, Yo-yo was not one of them. He was a risk-taker. Yo-Yo was the first Asian-looking young male music star that conquer the world!