Akira Ifukube was a Japanese composer born in Kushiro, Hokkaido in 1914 who began composing orchestral works in the 1930s and later became active as a film composer. His musical style combined elements of Japanese and Ainu folk music with robust orchestration, emphasising percussion and modal melodic writing, and over his career he alternated between concert composition and film scoring, bringing folk-derived motifs and symphonic techniques into postwar Japanese cinema.
