2. Ages from Childhood to Student   ----------Thank you for sparing time for me.  I’m interested in the production of the integral art field including composition and music performance while being a performer. I want to ask you, Mr. Kaneko, about these things because you have many and various successful achievements in the world of musical enterprise. First, would you tell me about your first encounter with music?   I think I was five years old when I asked my mother to buy a violin after I watched female violinist’s performance on TV. I wanted to play violin like her. In Japan, it is common for a six-year-old child to start practicing something. In my case my mother took me to a violin teacher who was a member of the NHK symphony orchestra when I turned six. That was my first encounter with music.   ---------- Does this episode indicate that your parents are music lovers?   Not particularly. My father may be a music lover. I remember him listening classical records on a record player during the holidays. I remember the sound of his player but I don’t think my parents intended me to learn music at first. However, after I started practicing the violin, they supported me to go lessons and later in high school they gave me a tuba. In that sense, they were supportive of my musical interests.  However, the first time I asked them about me going to music collage when I was a high school student they disagreed fiercely.   ----------Since you started practicing violin, you haven’t been separated from music at all?   No. I’ve loved music all the while. When I was a student of elementary school I was a member of a fife drum band at school, and the first day of my junior high school, I entered the brass band club. I actually wanted to play trombone at that time because the movement of the long slide made the performance of the instrument cool for me. But the seats of trombonists were filled already, and I was assigned to play tuba instead. I hadn’t seen a tuba before. After that, I played the instrument all the time; before class began in the morning, lunch hour and after school. I liked to play the instrument very much.   ----------Did your music teacher at school teach you to play the tuba?   At first, elder students and the music teacher taught me, then, after I became a high school student I took lessons from a professional performer. I even considered going to a music collage as a tuba player, once. However, job opportunities for tuba players are few, and my favorite music at that time was the works of classical style composers like Mozart. That is not fit for my instrument because the orchestral repertory for tuba is limited to the music since the mid-Romantic period. Finally I gave up on being a tuba player and studied economies at University. During that time, I set my tuba aside.   ----------There are relatively many male students studying in music collages in The United States while in Japan it is hard to be a music major student for a man because of the limited job opportunities you just talked about. When you were a University student, did you continue to play music in any form?   I played the violin in the University orchestra. I was even a conductor of the orchestra when I was a senior. I took conducting lesson for two years. I also played as a member of a string quartet my entire student days at the University and took many chamber music lessons. I learned a lot about orchestra and chamber performance during those days   ----------There were very useful days for you. How about friends?   Yes, many friends at that time were working actively in various fields, and they often helped me.