Kotaro Oshio was born in Osaka in 1968, and started playing guitar in a folk singer/songwriter style at age 14. After high school he attended a music school in Tokyo, and then headed back to Osaka where he played electric bass in a rock band. In part following his muse, and partly trying to make a living as a musician, he began again playing acoustic guitar and developed a distinctive steel string acoustic playing style involving strumming, picking, tapping, alternative tunings, harmonics and...

Kotaro Oshio was born in Osaka in 1968, and started playing guitar in a folk singer/songwriter style at age 14. After high school he attended a music school in Tokyo, and then headed back to Osaka where he played electric bass in a rock band. In part following his muse, and partly trying to make a living as a musician, he began again playing acoustic guitar and developed a distinctive steel string acoustic playing style involving strumming, picking, tapping, alternative tunings, harmonics and using the guitar body as a percussion instrument. He built up a local following playing local "livehouses" and released two albums, Oshio Kotaro in 1999 and Love Strings in 2001, on his own Kotaro label. This led to his signing with Toshiba/EMI, where he released Starting Point in 2002, which was picked up internationally by Narada. In the same year, but before his album was released, the producer of the Montreux Jazz Festival, Claude Nobs visited Japan, and was so impressed by seeing him play live that he booked him for the festival on the spot. He has now played Montreux three times, and at on one occasion at B.B. King's request, played with the blues master onstage. His 2003 album Dramatic was also released internationally. While his music is often complex and innovative, it is consistently tasteful and tuneful. Like Michael Hedges, to who he is sometimes compared, outside of Japan he is marketed primarily as a "new age" artist. His live performances, however, contain elements of rock, blues, jazz, and a healthy bit of humor. Well beyond appealing only to guitar freaks, his melodic music has given him a diverse audience, and his photogenic looks have helped him build a sizable female fan base. He has written for TV and film, and has done his own arrangements for a number of existing movie theme songs. His inventive version of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is especially popular.