Mamoru Fujisawa was born on 6 December 1950 in Nakano, Nagano Prefecture, began the violin at four by the Suzuki method, and spent his childhood watching hundreds of films a year with his father. He entered the Kunitachi College of Music in 1969 as a composition major and studied with the anime composer Takeo Watanabe. He wrote his first anime score, for Gyatoruzu, in 1974 under his own name, worked in minimalist and electronic idioms influenced by Yellow Magic Orchestra, and released his first album MKWAJU in 1981 and the electropop record Information a year later. The professional name is a pun on Quincy Jones: the characters read as Hisaishi can also be pronounced Kuishi, close to the Japanese transliteration of Quincy, and Joe came from Jones.

In 1983 he was asked to make an image album for Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, beginning a partnership that has covered all but one of Miyazaki’s films, including Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke. He has written more than a hundred film scores, among them seven for Takeshi Kitano — A Scene at the Sea, Sonatine, Kids Return, Hana-bi, Kikujiro, Brother and Dolls — and the Oscar-winning Departures of 2008; the theme “Summer”, from Kikujiro, became his best-known single piece. He founded his own studio, Wonder Station, in 1985 and the Wonder Land label in 1989, and works as a conductor and pianist alongside the scoring.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hisaishi
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q275900