On Jan. 16, 2014, the musician and producer Masahide Sakuma died after losing his battle with cancer. He was 61.
I only had the pleasure of meeting Sakuma on a couple of occasions, but I was lucky enough on one of them to see him work. He was a kind, generous man and a consummate professional whose career charts many of Japanese pop music's ups and downs over the past few decades.
Emerging into the music scene of the late 1970s, Sakuma was part of a generation of artists who looked abroad for inspiration even as they reshaped and redefined Japanese music. He came to prominence as a member of the Plastics, one of the defining acts of the Japanese new wave movement that sprung up alongside punk rock and one of the pioneers of electronic pop.