TOKYO

Mukaiya is a jazz keyboardist by trade. He joined Casiopea in 1977, which was a big deal in Tokyo at the time. They were probably the most successful jazz-fusion band Japan ever produced. He played the keyboard solos. If you've heard any Japanese eighties pop on the radio you've heard the sound he had a hand in: synths, bright, very clean, slightly silly in retrospect. Anyway, that was his day job for twenty years.

He started his own studio, Ongakukan, in 1985, and for a long time it did soundtrack work and product themes. The station commissions are a late chapter, not an early one. He wrote a piece called Tabidachi (Departure) for the Keisei Skyliner in 2009. Then Tokyu Toyoko, the line that runs between Shibuya and Yokohama, asked him for two pieces when they opened a new underground platform in 2013. He's gone back to that line every few years since. hear his 2025 Toyoko return

The thing that changes the field is 2015. Mukaiya goes to Tokyo Metro with an idea nobody had asked for. Instead of writing one station melody, what if he wrote two, in related keys, one for outbound trains and one for inbound. When two trains pull in at the same time, which on the Tozai Line happens often, the pieces harmonise. The platform becomes a duet, basically. Tokyo Metro said yes. He's now done twenty-three stations like that. hear the chain-song

And the commissions keep coming. Fukutoshin, bits of the Kyushu Shinkansen, the full Tokyu Meguro program in 2022, and last November a new one at Toyoko which is where he started. He's 69. I don't know how much longer he's planning to do this. Nobody else is.

He's the only major composer in this catalogue still writing new ones. When he stops, the catalogue stops growing. And when JR East finishes converting its lines to one-man operation without a platform attendant, most of the JR side of the catalogue stops mattering.