Haruomi Hosono is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of Japanese popular music over the past 50 years.
The grandson of the only Japanese passenger and survivor aboard the Titanic, he was born in Tokyo in 1947. From the end of the 1960s, Hosono was a pivotal figure in creating a folk scene based around the coffee shops of Shibuya. In 1970, he formed the band, Happy End, today considered among the country's most influential groups ever, with their blend of folk, rock and psych, perhaps the first domestic artist to successfully integrate the Japanese language into an essentially Western rock music idiom.
By the mid-'70s, over a string of albums, he was combining the sounds of New Orleans, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Caribbean and more into music dubbed "tropical" and "exotica."