Japan is a country where video game soundtracks more often than not appear in their Billboard top 10. What often doesn't appear in their top 10 is the Classical Music genre. One man, decided to change that, a man who by his own admission was said to have been a child prodigy, Mamoru Samuragochi.
This story follows the weird tale of Mamoru Samuragochi, a man who faked deafness to avoid answering questions about his art, faked a broken hand to avoid playing his art and had an unknown university teacher ghost write his work. He rose to the top of Japan's limelight only to have his lies catch up with him and have it all come crashing down.
Japan is a country where video game soundtracks more often than not appear in their Billboard top 10. What often doesn't appear in their top 10 is the Classical Music genre. One man, decided to change that, a man who by his own admission was said to have been a child prodigy, Mamoru Samuragochi.
This story follows the weird tale of Mamoru Samuragochi, a man who faked deafness to avoid answering questions about his art, faked a broken hand to avoid playing his art and had an unknown university teacher ghost write his work. He rose to the top of Japan's limelight only to have his lies catch up with him and have it all come crashing down.
The Beethoven of Japan
"LOSING MY HEARING WAS A GIFT FROM GOD."
Mamoru Samuragochi walks with an air of mystery… his clothing Is all black, he has a slight limp and uses a cain. His glasses are tinted black. His left hand has a cast around It, tendonitis from a life of intensive practice with the sole purpose of perfecting his music. His hair is flowing as walks upon the stage where his assistant waits, he camly stands before a massive crowd in a theatre packed with red seats and balconies overlooking him.
He signals to his assistant to begin his Orchestra, The Music, His music which he has painstakingly spent a lifetime creating and putting his soul into…
He signals to his assistant to begin the orchestra…
Beautiful music ensues
You might recognize this song from the Hollywood movie Shutter Island…
-Play shutter Island part--
When he finishes the Crowd explodes with applause.
This is the story of The Digital Age Beethoven of Japan
The night Mamoru Samuragochi lost his hearing completely, he had a dream. “I was sitting on a beach at night, alone, holding my knees,” he wrote in his 2007 autobiography, Symphony No. 1. He stood and walked into the sea until the water came up to his neck. All he could hear was the sound of waves crashing on the shore. “At that moment, something grabbed my ankles and started pulling me under.” He struggled to swim to the surface but kept sinking. “The sound became smaller and smaller as the water entered my ears,” he wrote. “All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe anymore, and I lost consciousness. It was then that I woke up.”
He got out of bed, walked over to his keyboard, and laid his fingers on the keys. He heard nothing. “I realized the keyboard wasn’t on,” he wrote. “I thanked God.” He switched it on, held his breath, and struck the keys again. “The result was the same.” Silence. He started to panic. He paced the room, smashed his ears with his fists, and slammed his head against the wall. When he finally came to, he found himself in a puddle of blood—somehow he had torn his knee to the bone. “But nothing mattered,” he wrote.
Then Samuragochi got an idea. The tinnitus inside his skull maintained a steady pitch, like a tuning fork. He grabbed a blank sheet of staff paper. His favorite Beethoven piece, the “Moonlight Sonata,” played in his head, and he scribbled it down from memory. He then found the original sheet music and laid the two pieces of paper side by side. They were identical, note for note. Samuragochi wept. Even if he couldn’t hear, he could keep composing.
Japan and victim culture
In Japan the Victim is often times the hero… This mentality comes from a long ancient tradition of Samurai and Seppoku. It also stems from World War II where any school child who payed attention in history class could tell you about the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial army during the 2nd world war. The Japanese aren’t taught that, they largely avoid teaching the atrocities they committed during the war and as a result most Japanese aren’t aware of it.
While visiting the Hiroshima memorial sight, Masakuza Miyamoto, 62 and a retired welder said
"There was no need to drop this bomb," "We were the victims of a scientific experiment."
On August 6, 1945 a rice deliveryman and his wife who went by the surname Samuragochi were within 2 miles of the blast of the nuclear bomb that went off at 8:16 AM. It rained hell on the civilians of Hiroshima. The husband and wife survived but were burned after being covered in the “black rain” of nuclear fallout.
They would be honored with the title hibakusha (in Japanese meaning Irradiated in the atomic bombings) a title given to the victims of the nuclear bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima
18 years later they would have a boy, a boy who was said to have been a child prodigy, he began playing the piano by the age of four. By the age of 10 he was able to play the works of Beethoven and Bach on piano; He claims .
Later in life, When this boy was in high school he began suffering migraines, allegedly from his parents exposure to radiation in the Hiroshima bombing.
The boy was Mamoru Samuragochi and he had a disdain for modern music… such a strong disdain that he did not attend university or music school. He like Eminem – Insert 8 mile – Decided to go solo, he decided to prove his musical genius to the world and teach himself how to compose …
Well first he played in a rock band,
After high school he would continue to front his band until tragedy struck, when his younger brother tragically died in a car accident he gave rock and took up composing…
By 1993 he was writing scores for television and film and in 1996 he landed a job, which the former child prodigy decided he would need help with…
On a summer afternoon in 1996 Mamuro Samuragochi set up a meeting with a university music teacher Takashi Niigaki to discuss help on a project.
The Project was to create a soundtrack for a Japanese movie called Remembering the Cosmos flowers, the story was about a Teenager, Akiko who returns to her small town in Japan after 7 years in South America, where she has contracted AIDS.
Samuragochi needed a score to set the desperate tone, and asking for help with a project this large isn’t uncommon, breaking down a composition into pieces for each instrument is very tedious.
Niigaki remembers Samuragochi was intense, he told Niigaki he “subsisted without food” and was almost absurdly confident saying he was famous in his field. Samuragochi handed him a tape of is own music, to give Niigaki a sense of his style. It featured Tibetan monks chanting over a rhythm track., “It was rudimentary, to be kind” Niigaki remembers.
Samuragochi was no Mozart, but he had managed to get the soundtrack job, which was more than Niigaki had ever done. Plus, Niigaki had always had difficulty saying no. He took the job.
Takashi Niigaki had a similar background to Samuragochi, he also was a child prodigy, who also began playing the piano by age 4. He even also could perform Bach and Beethoven by a young age. Small World.
He passionately loved classical music, for university he went to Toho Gakuen School of Music, the alma mater of the renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa, and stayed on after graduation to teach composition. His students loved their soft-spoken teacher, a gentle savant with an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music. Most lecturers, when discussing a composition, would hand out photocopied sheets of music to students; Niigaki would write on the chalkboard from memory.
Takashi Niigaki was very different from Mamoru Samuragochi. Niigaki, the then-25-year-old dressed conservatively and mumbled without making eye contact. He had a difficult time saying no and was very reserved. his friend Takafumi Suzuki, a music critic in Tokyo said about him “I don’t think he’s really capable of doing anything besides writing music,”.
The two men shook hands and agreed to their partnership. Samuragochi gave Niigaki a demo tape as guidance for the film score. It turned out orchestration was only part of the job. Some of the tracks, recorded at home on Samuragochi’s synthesizer, were complete; others were sketches that Niigaki would have to rework entirely. Two months later, Niigaki sent the finished piece back to Samuragochi. “He was very, very pleased,” Niigaki said.
At the end of the recording process, Samuragochi told Niigaki that, unfortunately, he would not be credited for the score. Niigaki was disappointed, but he deferred to Samuragochi. It wasn’t the first time a composer had hogged credit for the work of an underling, and Niigaki was grateful for the chance to write for an orchestra.
Six months later, the phone rang. Samuragochi had landed another job, the soundtrack for a video game in the Resident Evil series, and he needed Niigaki’s help.
Resident Evil is a video game series by Japanese video game developer Capcom, It invited and brought to the mainstream the Survival Horror Genre of video games. A very unique type of gaming that combines a terrifying atmosphere (Boosted by terrifying music) with limited resources while in a fight or die situation and solving puzzles.
this game has changed Gaming as well as pop culture and has been cited as one of the greatest games of all time. Noted for inventing the Survival Horror Genre of video games, a very unique type of gaming where the player must survive nightmarish settings with limited resources all the while solving puzzles.
It also has been credited with re-popularizng Zombies which had mostly gone away by the 80s and 90s…
Released in 1996 to critical acclaim which included praise for its masterpiece of a soundtrack.
---Play original RE SONG---
Capcom was working on Resident Evil 2 but producer Shinji Mikami
Was unsatisfied with the result by early 1997. He ordered Resident evil 2 to be completely scrapped and to start over again. The Bloodthirsty Resident Evil fans needed something so Mikami decided to release a rehashing of the old Resident evil game called, Resident Evil Directors Cut (dual shock) to appease them. It was the same game but with different enemy locations, different iteam locations and of course…. A new soundtrack, with the best in the game, orchestrating the music, a former child prodigy, Mamoru Samuragochi.
Picture the Scene
Mansion floor 1 ---
The music setting the tone for such an eerie setting,
Imagine you are on a rescue operation in a nearby forest, you along with your crew are searching when suddenly you hear a low growl. You stop to listen… when suddenly 100 meters from you your friend and comrade gets tackled to the grown by a dark blur, you cant tell what is on him but it has the figure of a wild beast… He screams in pain as more blurs rush to him. You Begin firing but your bullets are ineffective. His screams are blood curdling and all you can do is unload your pistol into the monsters and once out of ammo watch speechless… You have just witnessed your friend devoured by rabid zombified dogs… Suddenly it turns to you and you stand there frozen, The demon charges and another comrade shoots it and grabs you screaming RUN! You run to a mansion off in the distance as your compatriots defend you from the rabid pack that is pursuing you…
Everything seems to go black and your memory is gone, once inside the shock lifts and you come to, as you catch your breath inside. In the Chaos you realise a member of your small squad is missing, you and the other 2 survivors in the group both police officers discuss what should be done next as you hear thunder in the distance.
Suddenly you hear a gunshot, and you are sent to investigate. You find a fellow officer being decapitated and eaten alive by a Flesh eating zombie for one of the best Video Game reveals in gaming History
-Play Zombie devouring music intro-
As the nightmare progresses in the demonic mansion you solve cryptic puzzles and eventually come across a latter that decends into the darkness of the Mephistophelean mansion….
After facing untold horrors you find yourself slowly descending down into a humid subterranean room.
-Insert Basement 1-
-caverns is pretty bad-
You Trek down a narrow subterranean hall dimly lit by candlelight that will soon burn out, you can smell Mold and decay in the moist room. To the left of the latter you just descended from is a dark blue wall that extends to what you can barely make out to be door and a zombified pale creature guarding it facing the opposite direction.
To the right is another narrow hall, you creep towards it attempting to not alert the moaning creature. In here you are horrified to see another monster facing you. You point your Standard issue Berretta and unload on the creature. Hitting its face and body multiple times, the bullets seem ineffective until finally it goes down after 7 shots. It lets out a low moan, lands on its face and a pool of blood pours out. It is no longer moving.
The hall is a dead end and you fear to turn back as your firing almost certainly got the attention of the monster you just avoided in the other hall. You Run back towards the latter and confront the other monster this time equipping the shotgun you found earlier while exploring the mansion. With one shot to the head he is decapitated. You proceed past him to the door
You Enter Another dimly lit room with an even stronger stench of death in the air. You hear a sound of slurping and tearing. You proceed forward and to your horror in the corner on the left is a corpse being devoured by 2 others.
You panic and run immediately to the door opposite of them…
Samuragochis soundtrack for Resident Evil has been described in many ways…
"When you use mayonnaise as an instrument."
“If Comic Sans was a song, this is what it would sound like.”
"When you flush the toilet, but the water starts rising."
“Clowns farting in the basement.”
The confusing thing about Samuragochis’ work was that some of it was absolutely wonderful, even surpassing the original soundtrack
--Insert song good--- Resident evil
While some were absolutelty tone deaf
Insert Song bad---
The Music left many fans of the series confused. But it must have worked well enough for capcom as they once again hired Samuragochi for a new and even larger project
Capcom had hired Samuragochi to compose 20 minutes of music for Onimusha, a Samurai game for PlayStation 2, and they asked for a 205-piece orchestra to perform at the press conference announcing the game—a rare splurge for a video-game soundtrack.
Samuragochi once brought Niigaki to a meeting with Capcom producers and introduced Niigaki as his assistant. Whenever the Capcom producers had a technical question about the music, Samuragochi would defer to Niigaki. Again, Samuragochi received full credit for the score.
Niigaki’s friends described him as well-meaning but submissive, accommodating to the point of spinelessness. “If somebody is pushy, he’s going to be the first to back down,” said Suzuki. “Samuragochi is not a man he could say no to.”
Samuragochi began complaining of having hearing problems around this time. The reason was, as he became a larger and larger public figure he was having more difficulty speaking with the representatives of capcom and the press. If he pretended to be deaf, he could avoid answering.
It also became clear to Niigaki by this time that he could not even write music.
But the orchestra posed a problem. A conductor often needs to confer with the composer of a new piece of music, so Samuragochi recommended that Capcom hire Niigaki to lead the orchestra. During rehearsals, when a question arose, Niigaki would pretend to consult Samuragochi. “I would go over to him and point to the score so he could nod,” Niigaki said.
Samuragochi asked Niigaki to prepare a note as his assistant describing the composer and his compositions, once Samuragochi received the note he made some revisions…
The title now read: “Witness a Miracle.” The development of the theme in the second section was “an act of God,” the climax in the third movement “a work of genius.” The author of the essay, “Niigaki,” then recounted watching Samuragochi compose the piece in a fit of creative madness, “almost like he was possessed.”
When Niigaki saw the essay printed under his name, he was “profoundly embarrassed,” he said. “My face turned red.” Niigaki was now on the record as part of the lie.
Still, that wasn’t what flustered Niigaki most. The liner notes contained an even more disturbing passage: “Mamoru Samuragochi is currently working on his first symphony.”
A few years had passed and Samuragochi once again came to Niigaki for a request, this time his largest yet, he wanted Niigaki to compose a 70-minute Symphony. More importantly this wouldn’t just be for a gamer audience this would be for the world, representing Japan.
It would be titled, Symphony No. 1 Hiroshima: and it would be dedicated to the Victims of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing, which his parents and his alleged hearing were victims of.
Samuragochi asked for Niigaki to complete four themes, which he called “Prayer,” “Ascension,” “Suffering,” and “Chaos.”
Niigaki didn’t think much of Samuragochi’s guidelines. “That’s not how you make music,” he said. In his autobiography, Samuragochi wrote: “Music, if it’s meant to support people who are suffering, can only be created by someone who has suffered more than anybody else.” But for Niigaki, composing the symphony wasn’t a matter of digging into his soul. It was about using a set of musical tools, developed over centuries, to conjure those feelings. The experience of suffering itself, he said, is “completely unnecessary.”
While Niigaki worked on the project Samuragochi spent his time building up his reputation, he wrote an autobiography about “his” life. He built himself up to the press. He began wearing his signature tinted glasses. He also began wearing a cast on his left hand and as reported in his autobiography
“That same year, Samuragochi began work on his first symphony. Then one day, he felt a sharp pain in his wrist. “That’s when I realized I could not play piano anymore,” he wrote in Symphony No. 1. “I was shaking with anger, screaming in the studio, and I couldn’t even hear my voice screaming.” His tinnitus intensified, becoming a 24-hour intracranial roar, “as if I was trapped in a boiler room.” He had seizures, during which “it was rare that I didn’t urinate,” he wrote. “The sacred music room became a frightening battlefield of vomit and piss and blood.” Finally, in the fall of 2003, he finished the symphony. “Immediately after, I tried to kill myself.””
By 2003 He had completely gone deaf,
Doctors could never explain the reasons for Samuragochi’s hearing loss, but “some said they couldn’t rule out a genetic handicap as a second generation atomic bomb victim,” he wrote. “The blood of the atomic bomb itself now runs through my body.”
Incentivizing him more to complete this dedication to his fellow Hibakusha. Niigaki was disgusted, he knew it was all a ruse and he was apart of it. He began altering the Symphony as a way to mock Samuragochi, realizing Samuragochi was too tone deaf to ever understand what he had been doing.
Once completed some musical critics commented how it mimicked some of Gustav Mahlers lesser known works. Niigaki himself said he used the theme from the 1974 anime “Space Battleship Yamato” for inspiration and that Samuragochi was none the wiser
Niigaki was sure that Samuragochi would be exposed after the release of Hiroshima, He couldn’t even compose But somehow Samuragochi with his conman skills and Japans deference to the disabled not only survived but flourished, Hiroshima Symphony 1 sold over 180,000 Copies which is extremely high for the Classical genre. It would seem Japan had finally got its Beethoven.
Tragedy struck Japan when in 2011 the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami demolished the Japanese coast. The subsequent tsunami absolutely devastated the area. It was the fourth most powerful earthquake in recorded history and the largest to ever hit Japan. The earthquake triggered a tsunami that reached up to 40 meters high and it traveled up to 10kilometeres inland.
The flooding caused the nearby Fukusima Daiichi nuclear power plant to stop working. The loss of power caused 3 nuclear meltdowns and 3 hydrogen explosions releasing untold amounts of radiation into the pacific ocean.
These events devastated japan the economy saw a 0.47 percentage point decline in Japan’s real GDP growth in the year following the disaster and The World Bank's estimated economic cost was US$235 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in history.
During such a time of mourning the Japanese National Network NHK approached Japans biggest victim to create a documentary about Himself, Samuraguchi who having felt so much suffering in his life was the only person, able to empathize with the victims and Turn such a tragedy into beautiful music that would last the centuries.
The Documentary was titled Melody of the soul and would be about Samuraguchi composing his newest song in tribute to the victims of Tohoku and Fukusima. He humbly agreed but on one condition; The film crew could not record him writing his music for as he put it, “the Process is sacred.”
While Niigaki was writing Samuragochi’s composition, Samuragochi was pretending to go through hell. During the filming, he “met” a young girl named Minami—she was pre-screened by the producers—whose mother died in the tsunami, and dedicated the requiem to her. For inspiration, he sat alone on the beach where the girl’s mother disappeared, “so that the spirits of the victims come down to him,” according to the film’s narrator. Later, back at his house, he writhed in bed, groaned from the supposed pain of his tinnitus, swallowed dozens of white pills, and crawled around on the floor, apparently too weak to stand. Finally, Samuragochi stumbled into the living room. “It’s finished,” he said. He then disappeared into his study. Twelve hours later, he emerged with the complete score. The camera lingered over the perfectly shaped notes.
The documentary touched the nation of Japan and was viewed by millions of people. In addition to that Niigaki had realized Samuragochi in his autobiography had plagiarized parts of his own life. Niigaki had finally had enough. He told Samuragochi that he was going to expose him to end the charade. Samuragochi invited him to meet immediately and Niigaki agreed.
Once they met Samuragochi was given a note, “This is from my wife,” he said. In the letter, she begged Niigaki not to reveal the secret, suggesting that if he did, she and Samuragochi would kill themselves. Samuragochi then laid his head at Niigaki’s feet, begging him to continue. When Niigaki still hesitated, Samuragochi pressed an envelope with 1 million yen into his hand. This envelope brought the amount of money Samuragochi had paid Niigaki—for more than 20 pieces over 18 years—to 7 million yen, or about $60,000. Niigaki relented.
a little later Samuragochi came under fire when duing an interview with magazine Aera, Samuragochi had a number of inconcistencies including his ability to answer questions before his sign-language interpreter had finished signing and standing up to answer the doorbell when it rang.
Even though there was Gossip, Samuragochi’s record label refused to fire him. He was the Beethoven of Japan after all.
Niigaki began avoiding Samuragochi who needed Niigaki. Samuragochi stalked, him sent him emails and text messages, threatened him with suicide again and even threatened to show up at his work. Finally Niigaki had reached his breaking point once he overheard that a young violinist he and Samuragochi had known had been blacklisted due to Samuragochi’s increasingly strange demands of her. Allegedly she had a prostetic arm and Samuragochi wanted her to attach the arm while at a concert to exploit the disability, the little girl had refused and Samuragochi had her blacklisted as revenge. Once Niigaki had heard of this he exposed the lie to the little girls family who implored him to go to the press.
On February 6, 2014 Takashi Niigaki confessed at a press conference that he had been ghostwriting for Samuragochi for the past 18 years. Niigaki cited his reason for revealing the lie was to protect the figure skater Daisuke Takahashi who had selected the Beethoven of Japan’s Sonatina for Violin as his song in the Sochi Olympics in Russia and he didn’t want to shame him and Japan further by the deception. He profoundly begged for forgiveness and expressed his shame.
A few weeks later Mamoru Samuragochi would do the same. At his own press conference, He appeared transformed—clean shaven, hair cut short, trademark sunglasses gone. He expressed his extreme sorrow begged for forgiveness and then disappeared from the Japanese limelight completely.
Although Niigaki resigned from his job at Toho Gakuen he has since come to be quite popular in Japan. He has appeared on television, cultivating a reputation as a comical character on top of being recognized for his musical talent. His performances have begun drawing larger crowds than ever. Once again in Japan the victim would be the hero.
A tribute to Mamoru Samuragochi
Play really famous classical song
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-unmasking-of-japans-beethoven
https://newrepublic.com/article/121185/japans-deaf-composer-wasnt-what-he-seemed
https://www.inverse.com/gaming/resident-evil-25-composer-mamoru-samuragochi-impostor