In 1985, a week before the recording date, a composer dropped out of an animated series called Yume no Hoshi no Button Nose. Someone needed to write the music, and there were four days left. The job was orchestral, and the count was seventy-six pieces. Kohei Tanaka said yes immediately.
He divided seventy-six by four and got nineteen pieces a day, and he made a schedule on that basis. The score was finished in three and a half days. The people he met through that job, among them the producer Shiro Sasaki, would matter for the rest of his career.
He had been born in Osaka in 1954, and his father was a doctor who expected a doctor for a son. In 1967, when Tanaka was thirteen, he went to the Festival Hall in Osaka to hear the Bayreuth Festival perform Tristan and Isolde under Pierre Boulez. He has said it overwhelmed him. When the curtain calls began, nobody left, and he kept applauding until his hands swelled.
In the spring of his last year of high school, he told his father he wanted to be a composer. His father was surprised. Then he told his son about the newspaper reporter he himself had once wanted to be, and he said: if you truly want this, try it. He attached a condition, as Tanaka tells it: enter the best school in Japan, and become the best composer in Japan. Tanaka entered the composition department at the Tokyo University of the Arts.
After graduating he took a job at Victor Musical Industries, in the promotion department. He worked there about three years. Then his father fell ill, and from his bed he asked: what happened to the story about becoming a composer? His father died. Two months later, Tanaka handed in his resignation.
He went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston to study jazz, for about two years. Having already finished the basics in Japan, he kept going back to the student office, asking to be placed in an advanced class and repeating the words 'Too easy for me!' They let him in. He earned the top grade in that class.
When he came home, there was no work. For roughly six months he played piano at a hotel lounge to pay his bills. Then the connections from his Victor years produced a first job in 1982: arranging an insert song for the anime Arcadia of My Youth: Endless Orbit SSX. The song was composed by Shunsuke Kikuchi. Tanaka arranged it. After that came arrangements for Kinnikuman and for tokusatsu series, and in 1985, the four-day call. Through Sasaki's introduction he met the writer Oji Hiroi. In 1996, on September 27, Sega released Sakura Wars for the Saturn, with Tanaka's music. Its theme, 'Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan,' became the song everyone in the series knew, and the vocal songs written for the franchise now number over five hundred. Looking back, he has said Sakura Wars let him do whatever he liked, and that this widened him as a musician.
The four-day job was not the beginning of his preparation. It was the first time anyone asked to see it. What is the thing you have been getting ready for, quietly, for years, and if the phone rang tomorrow with four days on the clock, would you already know your answer?