Yoshio Hachimura was born in Tokyo on October 10 in 1938. His father was a high school teacher of mathematics and his mother was a music teacher in an elementary school. The Pacific War ended when Hachimura was seven years old, and he listened to the Imperial Rescript on Surrender at a small temple in Matsuida, a region of Gunma prefecture, where he and a group of people had been evacuated. At the age of 9, Hachimura began to learn the violin and studied solfege under Minao Shibata and Yoshirō Irino at the ‘Music School for Children’ (now a part of Tōhō Gakuen Daigaku). He also studied piano and composition under the tutelage of Taminosuke Matsumoto. After graduating from Komaba High School, Hachimura was admitted to Tokyo University of Arts.

Hachimura’s Opus 1 is “Improvisation for Piano” (1957), which made use of principles of atonality and indeterminacy. Hachimura subsequently composed “Shigarami I” (1959), a piece based on the traditional jōruri piece “Katsuragawa Renri no Shigarami”, and “Hitoiki goto ni Ichi-jikan (Every Breath, One Hour)” (1960), a piece influenced by P. Boulez. From around 1963, Hachimura also assisted Tōru Takemitsu in making fair copies of scores. Hachimura finished composing “Seishin-fu” in 1969 and “Shigarami II” in 1970. “Sakuran no Ronri (The Logic of Insanity)”, which was premiered in 1975, was awarded the Fukuyama Prize and the piece was later awarded a prize by the National Contemporary Music Association. On June 15 in 1985, Hachimura passed away at the age of 46, unable to complete “La Folia”.

Hachimura paid strong attention to the sense of touch of sounds and he left behind an oeuvre suffused with an emotional and subjective character. To Hachimura, music was indeed that ‘thing’ which is being moved by the ‘emotional energy’ possessed by sound in a given moment; a music which, from moment to moment, always should speak in the ‘present tense’. Composition for Hachimura represented thus an act which, by way of inner desires, seeks to reach a piercing expression of man’s emotional depth.