Akira Ifukube

Akira Ifukube (Japanese: 伊福部 昭) was a Japanese classical composer and film composer, best known for his music for Toho’s kaiju films, especially the original 1954 film Godzilla. Born in Kushiro on the island of Hokkaido, he was the third son of a Shinto priest. Much of his childhood was spent in areas where Japanese and Ainu communities lived side by side, and exposure to the traditional music of both peoples strongly shaped his musical language.

He learned to play violin and shamisen, and encountered Western classical music while attending secondary school in Sapporo. According to a widely told account, at age 14 he decided to become a composer after hearing a radio broadcast of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring; he also cited Manuel de Falla as a major influence. Ifukube studied forestry at Hokkaido University and composed in his spare time, initially as a largely self-taught composer. His first piece was a piano solo work titled Piano Suite (later retitled Japan Suite in an orchestral arrangement), dedicated to the pianist George Copeland; plans for Copeland to perform it were disrupted when correspondence ended during the Spanish Civil War.

Ifukube’s international breakthrough came in 1935 when his first orchestral work, Japanese Rhapsody, won first prize in an international young composers’ competition supported by Alexander Tcherepnin. The jury included Albert Roussel, Jacques Ibert, Arthur Honegger, Alexander Tansman, Tibor Harsanyi, Pierre-Octave Ferroud, and Henri Gil-Marchex, who unanimously selected him as the winner. When Tcherepnin visited Japan the following year, Ifukube studied modern Western compositional theory with him, and in 1938 Piano Suite received an honorable mention at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Venice. In the late 1930s, his music, especially Japanese Rhapsody, was performed several times in Europe.

After graduating he worked in forestry and lumber processing. Toward the end of World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army assigned him to research the elasticity and vibrational strength of wood. During this period he suffered radiation exposure after an unprotected X-ray examination, a consequence of wartime shortages of lead shielding, which forced him to abandon forestry work and commit to a professional career in composition and teaching. During a subsequent hospital stay, he was startled to hear one of his own marches being broadcast on the radio to accompany the arrival of General Douglas MacArthur for Japan’s surrender proceedings.

From 1946 to 1953 he taught at Tokyo University of the Arts, and during this time wrote his first film score, The End of the Silver Mountains (1947). Over the next fifty years he composed more than 250 film soundtracks, with a landmark achievement in 1954: the score for Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla. Beyond composing the music, he helped create Godzilla’s signature roar—produced by rubbing a leather glove coated with resin against loosened double-bass strings—and the monster’s footstep sounds, made by striking an amplifier case. Although film work brought financial success, he regarded concert composition as his most beloved pursuit, and he often allowed the two areas of his output to enrich each other; for example, he reworked music from his 1953 ballet Shaka into the 1961 film Buddha, and later transformed the film music into the three-part symphonic ode Gotama the Buddha (1988).

Ifukube returned to teaching at Tokyo College of Music, later becoming its president, and after retiring in 1987 he headed the college’s ethnomusicology department. He mentored a younger generation of Japanese composers including Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yasushi Akutagawa, Kaoru Wada, Isshimal Motoji, Tadashi Yamauchi, and Satoshi Imai, and published a large-scale (about 1000 pages) music-theory book titled Orchestration. He received major Japanese honors including the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon (1980), the Order of the Sacred Treasure (3rd class, 1987), and the Order of Culture (2003). Ifukube died in Tokyo at age 91 in Meguro-ku Hospital from multiple organ failure.

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