Koji Endo
BIOGRAPHY
Koji Endo (遠藤浩二, born 1964 in Yonago, Tottori Prefecture) is a Japanese composer and arranger with roughly 285 crew credits between 1992 and 2026. He runs his own Tokyo studio, SoundKids, and works as the head of SOUND KID’S.
He is best known as Takashi Miike’s composer, a partnership that began with Rainy Dog (極道黒社会) in 1997 and covers much of the director’s internationally released work, including Audition (1999), Dead or Alive (1999), Visitor Q (2001), The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), Gozu (2003), Zebraman (2004), Izo (2004), One Missed Call (2004) and Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). Away from Miike his credits extend to horror films, television, live-action manga adaptations and children’s tokusatsu, and they continue into the 2020s, with credits in every year of the decade, including four dated 2026.
Away from the titles already named, the Miike scores run on through Full Metal Yakuza (1997), The Bird People in China (1998), City of Lost Souls (2000) and Dead or Alive: Final (2002), and then past the middle of the 2000s to 13 Assassins (2010), Lesson of the Evil (2012), Shield of Straw (2013), First Love (2019), The Great Yokai War: Guardians (2021) and Lumberjack the Monster (2023). On television he has scored the period series Kumokiri Nizaemon, which returned across the years 2013 to 2023. He also wrote music for Mother Game in 2015 and for Yami Baito Kazoku in 2024.
One of those 2026 credits is Hold on, Harutora-kun, the MBS Boys’ Love series, for which he wrote the score. The music credit is confirmed on the MBS programme site for the series.
Koji Endo’s first Miike score came in 1997 and his most recent credits date from 2026, a span of nearly three decades of continuous film and television work.
The Miike titles listed above run from Rainy Dog in 1997 to Sukiyaki Western Django in 2007, and the partnership carried on well beyond that decade, reaching Lumberjack the Monster in 2023.
His 2026 credit on Hold on, Harutora-kun is the score for an MBS production, and the music credit appears on the series’ own programme site.
The credit count of 285 covers every crew entry attached to his name, so multi-part television series count as several entries.
The dates of the partnership can be counted. His earliest credit is from 1992, so the first Miike score arrived five years into his career. The ten Miike titles named above are spread unevenly across the decade that followed: one in 1997, two in 1999, two in 2001, one in 2003, three in 2004 and one in 2007, which makes 2004 the busiest year on that list. From the first credit to the four dated 2026 is a span of thirty-four years, and the Harutora-kun score sits at the far end of it.
In my view the partnership is easier to hear than to describe. Audition from 1999 and The Happiness of the Katakuris from 2001 sit two years apart and could hardly be more different in tone, and one composer supplied both. If you want a sense of his range before you listen to the new series, I would put those two side by side first.
PROFILE DETAILS
- Native Name
- 遠藤浩二
- Real Name
- Koji Endo
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Birthplace
- Yonago, Tottori Prefecture, Japan
- Gender
- Male
- Profession
- Nationality
- Agency / Label
- SOUND KID'S
- Years Active
- 1992-present
- Languages
- Japanese
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