Toshiro Mayuzumi (黛敏郎, 20 February 1929, in Yokohama – 10 April 1997, in Kawasaki) was a Japanese composer of classical music, soundtracks, and traditional Japanese music. Mayuzumi was a student at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music immediately following the Second World War, before going to Europe where he attended the Paris Conservatoire national supérieur de musique. He was initially enthusiastic about avant-garde Western music but in the course of the 1950s he gradually became more interested in traditional Japanese music as well as esoteric Buddhism. Like the novelist Mishima Yukio, whose novel "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" he set as an opera ("Kinkakuji", 1976), Mayuzumi opposed the westernization of Japan and tried to emphasize his native cultural identity in his work. A prolific composer for the cinema, he composed more than a hundred film scores between "Waga ya wa tanoshi" ("It's Great to Be Young") in 1951 and "Jo no mai" in 1984. The best-known film with a score by Mayuzumi is probably "The Bible: In the Beginning" (1966). Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.