Kenji Kawai

Kawai studied at Japan's Kunitachi College of Music before building a career composing for anime and film through the 1980s, developing a reputation for blending traditional Japanese musical elements with modern orchestration.

He composed Ghost in the Shell's unforgettable choral theme using an ancient Japanese wedding-song vocal style — a haunting, ceremonial sound that became inseparable from cyberpunk's spiritual side. He has scored a large number of major anime film and television productions across his career.

This particular theme, written in an archaic vocal style and language, remains his single most widely recognized piece of work internationally, frequently cited by film composers as a landmark of anime scoring.