A Jazz Piano Trio Starts Scoring Japan's Morning Drama
On September 28, 2026, NHK's 115th serial morning drama (asadora), Blossom, premiered. It airs Monday through Saturday at 8:00 a.m. on NHK General for 15 minutes. Shizuka Ishibashi stars, the scripts are by Takeshi Sakurai and Yoshiko Komatsu, and the theme song is YOASOBI's "Sakihokore." The underscore, meanwhile, comes from fox capture plan, an instrumental trio of piano, bass and drums. It is the band's first time scoring an asadora.
The heroine is Tama Hano, a writer who races through the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras. She is modeled on the novelist Chiyo Uno, but the drama is presented as an original work of fiction with reimagined characters and settings. The Great Kanto Earthquake, war, marriage and divorce, money troubles: it is the life story of a woman who kept writing and kept chasing freedom through all of it. The series is produced by NHK Osaka. Asadora scores are usually associated with a composer building a big orchestral "face" for every morning. Handing that job to a three-piece band makes this season's asadora a must-watch for soundtrack fans.
The Producer Said "Swing Jazz"
The music team was announced in July 2026. Chief producer Shunpei Murayama said of fox capture plan's score that "warm, deep tones and rhythms support the heroine Tama Hano's all-out first step forward as she races through a turbulent era," adding that "the playful touch of bringing in the swing jazz that was popular at the time is lovely."
That is the interesting part. The Taisho and early Showa years Tama lived through were exactly when jazz flowed into Japan and began to play in dance halls and cafés. In other words, a score meant to recreate the air of the period and the strengths of a band that has always billed itself as "modern jazz rock" meet at the same point. When you think about period-drama scoring from scratch, the instinct is traditional Japanese instruments or a tidy orchestra. Blossom instead seems to want today's band to play the beat that the modern-girl era itself was dancing to.
The band's own comment: "We will color the world of Blossom with music while staying close to the path the characters walk. We are putting our hearts into music we hope becomes one of your daily morning pleasures." The musical style was also described as a jazz-centered band sound, with delicate piano and lively rhythms coloring the characters' joys, conflicts and everyday lives.
Three Players Known for Scores With Attitude
fox capture plan formed in 2011: Ryo Kishimoto on piano, Hidehiro Kawai on bass and Tsukasa Inoue on drums, a piano trio playing "modern jazz rock." 2026 marks their 15th anniversary. What put their name on the map in the soundtrack world was Fuji TV's 2018 Monday-9 drama The Confidence Man JP. In an interview at the time, they said the producers wanted something closer to overseas films and dramas than to typical Japanese TV, and they answered with a band sound expanded with horns and guitar. They even admitted the score was "pretty assertive for incidental music."
Their range since then has been wide.
- Drama: the Confidence Man JP series, Kenko de Bunkateki na Saiteigen do no Seikatsu, Rebooting (Brush Up Life), Unmet: A Neurosurgeon's Diary and more
- Anime: the Rascal Does Not Dream series (continuing through the finale film Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dear Friend, opening October 16), Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective
- Streaming: the live-action Oshi no Ko
The lightness of a con game, the quiet tension of a medical drama, the lyricism of adolescent fantasy. They change faces by genre, but the band's core never moves: the piano sings the melody while bass and drums lay down a groove with body heat. Now they are taking that core into the asadora's marathon format, 15 minutes every morning for about half a year.
What to Listen For in Each Morning's 15 Minutes
It is the fate of an asadora score that the same themes return dozens of times in different scenes. That is exactly why the best way to enjoy it is to follow how a motif changes its arrangement as Tama moves to Tokyo, stumbles, falls in love and writes. A small trio is especially good at describing emotion through the sway of tempo and rhythm. When the swing bounces hard, Tama is running forward; when only the piano remains, she has stopped in her tracks. Learn to hear that, and each 15 minutes gets much richer.
Another thing to watch is how the score relates to YOASOBI's theme song "Sakihokore." If the theme's job is to push you forward brightly, the underscore takes charge of the everyday moments in between. No soundtrack release has been announced yet, but it will be a pleasure, after half a year of story has piled up, to hear on one album how a jazz trio updated the sound of the asadora. For now, tune in tomorrow at 8 a.m. and listen closely for the moment the theme begins.
