On Jan. 16, 2014, the musician and producer Masahide Sakuma died after losing his battle with cancer. He was 61.
I only had the pleasure of meeting Sakuma on a couple of occasions, but I was lucky enough on one of them to see him work. He was a kind, generous man and a consummate professional whose career charts many of Japanese pop music¡¯s ups and downs over the past few decades.
Emerging into the music scene of the late 1970s, Sakuma was part of a generation of artists who looked abroad for inspiration even as they reshaped and redefined Japanese music. He came to prominence as a member of the Plastics, one of the defining acts of the Japanese new wave movement that sprung up alongside punk rock and one of the pioneers of electronic pop.
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