Koji Endo

BLGLFlix editorial view

It is worth stopping on what this credit actually is. Boys’ Love series are, with rare exceptions, made cheaply and quickly, and their music is usually written by people at the start of their careers or bought in as library cues. Hold on, Harutora-kun hired a composer with three decades and nearly three hundred productions behind him, including the scores to some of the most widely seen Japanese films of the last thirty years. Whatever else that says about the series, it is a real production decision, and it is the sort of thing a cast-indexed database never surfaces, because composers do not appear on cast lists.

It also tells you something about how Japanese BL is being made now. Japan came to the format late relative to Thailand and Korea, and it has been catching up by putting it inside the ordinary television production system rather than building a separate low-cost pipeline for it. A veteran MBS composer on a BL is what that looks like from the credits.

On the scale: 285 credits is not a figure to quote lightly. It is TMDB’s count of every crew entry attached to him, so it includes multi-part television and some duplication. Even discounted heavily it describes a working life of continuous scoring across thirty-four years.

One detail worth keeping. According to his Japanese Wikipedia entry he has competed since 2009 in races sanctioned by the Japan Automobile Federation as an amateur driver, and in 2015 he won the annual Clubman-series championship in the 86/BRZ Race. A man who has scored several hundred films spends his weekends racing cars, and won something doing it. It is included because it is verifiable and because a reference site that only ever prints filmographies produces pages nobody wants to read.

One data note. TMDB gives his date of birth as 1 January 1964 and Wikidata’s entry, Q2947344, records the same year at a precision of nine, meaning year only. The first of January is a storage artefact in both cases, not a birthday. This page publishes the year in prose and leaves the date field empty.