Yuji Ohno on Vinyl: Where to Start with the Lupin the Third Composer

Yuji Ohno spent most of his working life writing music for other people's pictures, and ended up with one of the most recognizable catalogs in Japanese music anyway. Born in Atami, Shizuoka in 1941, he taught himself jazz in the Keio University light music big band while enrolled in the law faculty, made his recording debut in 1966 accompanying singers, and around 1970 moved from the piano bench to the writing desk, scoring commercials first, then television and film.

In 1977 anime production shifted to Nippon TV, where Ohno was working, and he was handed Lupin the 3rd Part II. The rest of his career organized itself around it. He wrote every animated installment of the franchise that followed, from Part II through Part 6 in 2021, rebuilding the Lupin III theme each time, and called it his life's work. Animation, he said, gave him room live-action did not. To play it he assembled a studio band, You & Explosion Band: Rhodes, wah guitar, electric bass, horns, and a rhythm section that treated a cartoon thief as a reason to swing hard at disco tempo.

What makes the catalog worth shelf space is that the brief never thinned the music out. These are jazz-funk records that happen to have been commissioned, wide-screen and crisply produced, as at home in a crate with American soul as in a soundtrack bin. Ohno played his last concert in 2024 and died in May 2026 at 84, and the reissue program has kept going. Here is what GOOD TASTE carries, in the order we would hand it to you.

Yuji Ohno - Touch: The Sublime Sound of Vinyl LP

Start here if you are starting cold. Touch: The Sublime Sound of Yuji Ohno is the 2023 WeWantSounds compilation built with full access to his Nippon Columbia catalog, drawing on the mid-1970s to mid-1980s stretch where his writing was most elastic. It runs from "Silhouette" out of the Lupin sessions to "Kirameku Inner Space," his theme for the Captain Future series, to a reading of the Kurt Weill standard "Speak Low," and the sequencing argues that these were always records first.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The single-LP survey of his strongest decade, assembled from the source label
• Soundtrack cuts and standards sitting side by side with no seam
• The cheapest way to find out whether the deeper shelf is for you

Yuji Ohno, You & Explosion Band - Lupin the Third Original Soundtrack (Clear Red Color) Vinyl LP

The first of the Columbia soundtracks landed in 1978 and collects the music from the second television series, dialogue snippets threaded between the cuts the way Japanese OST albums of the era liked to do. This is the record that fixed the sound in people's heads: the theme at full stride, the band loose enough to sound improvised. Lupin the Third Original Soundtrack is back on clear red vinyl from Nippon Columbia, imported.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The 1978 original, where the Lupin III theme takes its definitive shape
• Clear red Nippon Columbia pressing, imported
• The foundation of everything else on this list

Yuji Ohno, You & Explosion Band - Lupin the Third Original Soundtrack 2 (Clear Pink Color) Vinyl LP

Also from 1978, the second volume widens the frame to take in the feature film The Mystery of Mamo alongside more series material, which hands Ohno longer forms and a bigger ensemble. Lupin the Third Original Soundtrack 2 is where the catalog leans cinematic rather than episodic, strings and horns doing work the television cues had no room for. Clear pink vinyl, imported.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• Series cues plus the music from The Mystery of Mamo on one LP
• The arrangements open up: more horns, more strings, longer forms
• Clear pink pressing, the middle chapter of the Columbia run

Yuji Ohno, You & Explosion Band - Lupin the Third Original Soundtrack 3 (Clear Yellow Color) Vinyl LP

Volume three arrived in 1979 and carries the music from The Castle of Cagliostro, the Hayao Miyazaki feature, next to the last of the second-series cues. The Cagliostro material is the warmest writing in the sequence, pastoral where the series cues were nocturnal, and it is the reason this volume gets pulled off the shelf by people who have never watched an episode. Lupin the Third Original Soundtrack 3 comes on clear yellow vinyl, imported.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The 1979 volume carrying The Castle of Cagliostro score
• The softest, most melodic corner of the Lupin catalog
• Clear yellow pressing, imported, and the one to pair with volume one

Yuji Ohno - The Inugami Family (Original Soundtrack) Vinyl LP

Before Lupin there was Kon Ichikawa's 1976 adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo's novel The Inugami Curse, with Koji Ishizaka as the detective Kosuke Kindaichi and Ohno writing the score for a former Keio classmate's picture. This is the live-action Ohno: dread handled with restraint, piano and strings circling a family that has already decided how things end. The Inugami Family is back on vinyl from Jet Set, imported, and it is the record that explains how he got the Lupin job.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• His 1976 score for the Kon Ichikawa mystery, imported from Jet Set
• The other Ohno: patient, orchestral, genuinely unsettling
• The piece that shows what he could do before anime claimed him

Yuji Ohno, You & Explosion Band - Full Course Vinyl LP

In 1983 Ohno took the band into the studio with nothing to illustrate and cut a record on the Invitation label under its own name. Full Course strips You & Explosion Band to five players, Ohno on keyboards with Kiyoshi Hagiya on guitar, Michio Nagaoka on electric bass, Yasushi Ichihara on drums and Eiji Narushima on Latin percussion, and across eight tracks including "Route 246" and "Metallic Moon" it simply sits in the pocket. No horn section, no strings, nothing to cut away from. Jet Set has it back as a limited 140g pressing, imported, its first time on vinyl in four decades.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The 1983 Invitation album, back on vinyl after forty years
• The band as a five-piece, no picture to serve
• Limited 140g Jet Set pressing, imported

Where else Ohno turns up on the shelf

Two side doors worth knowing about. Electro Keyboard Orchestra is the 1975 Columbia summit that put eight Japanese keyboard players on one record, Ohno among them alongside Hiromasa Suzuki, Kentaro Haneda and Masahiko Satoh; he wrote two of its pieces, including "The Soaring Sea Gull," which turns up again on Touch. Trio by Trio +1 hands a side to the Ohno Yuji Trio, the closest the shelf comes to hearing him as a straight jazz pianist. Solo records like Cosmos are part of the story too, though not in the racks here.

If You Like Yuji Ohno

Masayoshi Takanaka: the guitarist who turned the same Japanese fusion vocabulary into vacation music, and the deepest adjacent shelf in the shop.

Casiopea: the band that took Ohno's precision and ran it at twice the tempo, with Mint Jams as the way in.

Hiroshi Suzuki: trombonist, and Cat is the quiet Japanese jazz-funk classic that sits beside these records perfectly.

Ryo Kawasaki: guitarist working the electric end of the same era, Juice and Prism both carried.

Roy Ayers: the American parallel, writing the same kind of sunlit jazz-funk for a different set of pictures.

Where to go from here

If this is your corner, the broader Jazz Fusion shelf is where the rest of it lives, and the Soundtracks collection holds the composers who worked the same way Ohno did. Our Casiopea guide and Hiroshi Sato guide cover the two nearest rooms. For everything of his in one place, browse the full Yuji Ohno collection.

It's all in GOOD TASTE.