Akira Wada (和田アキラ, real name 和田晃; Wada Akira in Japanese order) was a Tokyo-born guitarist who started the fusion band Prism in 1975, when he was still a teenager. The band's own site calls it the first fusion band in Japan, and the Kyodo News obituary printed by Sankei Sports described it as a pioneer of the genre there. He led Prism or played in it for more than four decades while keeping a second career going: solo albums, a run of guitar-instruction records, and session work that put his guitar on a 1985 Akina Nakamori hit.

He was born on 26 August 1956 in Shinagawa, Tokyo. According to Japanese Wikipedia he first played drums, drawn to the Group Sounds bands his older sister liked, and switched to guitar when a school friend's makeshift band kept stalling around the one guitarist who would play an opening phrase and stop. Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zeppelin pulled him toward hard rock as a young teenager, and a serious illness in those years kept him at home long enough to push the guitar into the centre of his life. He skipped high school. At 16 he apprenticed himself to the studio guitarist Tsunehide Matsuki, carried his gear for a little over a year and was allowed to play alongside him on commercial-jingle sessions; Japanese Wikipedia says the teacher and student relationship lasted well after the roadie work ended. Around the same time he played in Roadrunner, a glam-influenced band.

By the mid-1970s he was booking his own live sessions around Tokyo, which brought in the then high-school-age keyboardist Daisaku Kume, and he recruited the semi-professional bassist Ken Watanabe. The group became Prism in 1975. Its early repertoire leaned on Santana, Return to Forever and Al Di Meola, and Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow, released that same year, settled the direction. Prism signed to Polydor, and its self-titled debut came out in 1977. Japanese Wikipedia credits Wada with composing all seven tracks; the guitarist Katsutoshi Morizono, who had just left Yonin-Bayashi, joined during the sessions and stayed for two years. The Kyodo obituary and English Wikipedia both record that the band opened for Eric Clapton at the Budokan soon afterwards. Second Thoughts/Second Move (1978), III (1979) and the double live set Prism Live (1979) followed on Polydor, and Surprise (1980) and Community Illusion (1981) on Warner Bros., with the drummer Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami among the guests on the live album.

Alongside the band he was already working as a sideman. On the 1978 Polydor session Tokyo Fusion Night, built around Murakami, he plays on "Come And Down" with the guitarists Issei Noro, Masaki Matsubara and Kenji Omura on the same record, and the same year he played electric guitar on two tracks of Yukihiro Takahashi's Saravah!, a record on which Ryuichi Sakamoto arranged and played keyboards and Masayoshi Takanaka and Matsuki also played guitar. He sat in with jazz-field players of his own age at Shinjuku Pit Inn, among them Toshiyuki Honda, and played guitar on Honda's Easy Breathing (1980). He also appeared in a television commercial for Greco guitars, which left a strong impression on young guitarists, and in 1981 he released The Guitar (Warner Bros.), a guitar-instruction LP with Murakami on drums, Ken Watanabe on bass and Satoshi Nakamura on keyboards, where every piece appears twice, once complete and once without the lead guitar so the listener can play along.

From about 1980 he ran two other groups beside Prism. One was Keep, the fusion band of the keyboardist Jun Fukamachi, with whom he made DG-581 (1981) and Rock'n Rocked Rock (1982). The other was the Latin-fusion big band Wesing, led by the pianist Naoya Matsuoka, on whose albums Son (1980), The Show and Danzon (both 1981) and The September Wind (1982) he plays guitar, with Hidefumi Toki on saxophone and Shigeharu Mukai on trombone for Danzon. Japanese Wikipedia says that meeting Fukamachi and Matsuoka shaped everything he did afterwards.

His own records began with Out & About (Moon Records, 1983), then Yellow Moon (TDK, 1984) with Ken Watanabe, Fukamachi and a string section, and the pair of 1984 Humming Bird albums billed to Akira Wada With Friends: Love Islands, with Toki on saxophone, and American Romance, with Honda on alto saxophone and Fukamachi arranging.

Prism went quiet in 1984, when its record contract ended and members left. It came back with Fukamachi as a supporting keyboardist and the drummer Mansaku Kimura, and through the later 1980s it worked mainly as a guitar, bass and drums core with Ken Watanabe, adding keyboards on Nothin' Unusual (1985), Dreamin' (1986) and The Silence of the Motion (1987). "Take Off", from Dreamin', was used in a Mild Seven television commercial. From 1985 he also joined Matsuoka's smaller group, which led to the work Japanese obituaries single out: the Latin-tinged electric guitar on Akina Nakamori's "Mi Amore" (1985), the album version of which is credited to him on D404ME, and the music for the Heart Cocktail animation. In 1988 he taught guitar on an NHK television course Matsuoka fronted. He left the Matsuoka group in 1991.

The 1990s were a decade of side projects and Prism's environmental trilogy (Mother Earth, Rejuvenation and A Personal Change, 1990 to 1992). In 1991 he made A Point of Blue with the keyboardist Hiromichi Tsugaki. In 1992 he formed the instrumental quartet W.I.N.S with the bassist Toshiki Nagai, the drummer Kozo Suganuma and the keyboardist Akira Ishiguro, and around 1997 began the sessions that became ExhiVision with Hiroyuki Namba on keyboards, Nagai and the drummer Koji Hasegawa. In 1995 he made Praia with the Brosky Riddim Section and sat in on Keep's reunion album Keep Alive, and in 1997 he and Ken Watanabe recorded the duo album For Your Ears Only as Duologue. He also guested on the bassist Tetsuo Sakurai's first solo album Dewdrops (1986) and on Sakurai's A Gate of the 21st Century (1999). Japanese Wikipedia adds that Wada filled in as the touring guitarist in Sakurai and Akira Jimbo's post-Casiopea band Jinsaku for about a year in the early 1990s, and that he and Casiopea's Issei Noro were the same age and had known each other since they were 16; Prism and Casiopea 3rd shared a double bill in November 2015, each by then down to its one original member, Wada and Noro.

Ken Watanabe left Prism in 2001, which made Wada the only original member, and Jiro Okada took over on bass. The 2000s version was mostly a trio, with keyboards added for special concerts and reunion shows that brought back earlier members, including the 2004 Homecoming concert at Club Citta. Universal reissued Prism's first four albums in 2003. In these years he also recorded the Ballads series of guitar standards for Cosmos Records (2001 to 2009), the play-along discs Plays Santana (2006) and Plays Jeff Beck (2007), and the duo album Digit Cafe (2005) with Fukamachi. Fukamachi passed away in 2010, and a recording of their February 2006 duo concert came out in 2022 as Super Duo Live. The keyboardist Chell Watanabe joined Prism as a full member in 2013, making it a quartet again, and the group's last albums, Celebrate and What You See, appeared in 2017.

In April and November 2018 he played the anniversary concerts for Murakami's 45 years as a professional, at Nakano Sunplaza and Billboard Live Osaka; the Osaka show on 3 November was their last collaboration. At the end of that year he fell ill and suspended all his activities, Prism included. He passed away on 28 March 2021, at a hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture, at 64. The Kyodo News obituary carried by Sankei Sports gave the cause as multiple organ failure caused by sepsis and said a funeral was held for close relatives only. Murakami had passed away nineteen days earlier, on 9 March. On 12 July 2022 Prism held a memorial concert, "PRISM presents Wada Akira Memorial Concert", at Club Citta' in Kawasaki, joined by Ken Watanabe, Daisaku Kume, Morizono, Satoshi Nakamura and several guitarists who had admired him.

Wada's playing was known for very fast picking and unusually easy command of odd meters, which made him and his contemporaries Issei Noro of Casiopea, Kyoji Yamamoto of Bowwow and Akira Takasaki of Loudness the guitarists many amateur players in Japan tried to imitate in the late 1970s. Prism's music, in Japanese Wikipedia's description, ran on an instrumental hard-rock foundation with jazz, ethnic and progressive-rock elements mixed in; the early records drew on Santana, Return to Forever and Al Di Meola, on Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow, and on the Tony Williams Lifetime and Billy Cobham and George Duke bands for ideas about how a band sounds. Discogs files almost all of the band's albums and his own leader records under Jazz with Fusion, Jazz-Rock and Jazz-Funk styles, which is the shelf he belongs on.

His other lane was more commercial. The same Discogs list shows him as the guitarist on pop and kayokyoku sessions for Akina Nakamori, Chisato Moritaka, Miki Matsubara and others, and Kyodo's obituary says he played at the live shows and recording sessions of Yosui Inoue and Moritaka. He is best understood as a fusion and jazz-rock guitarist with a large studio side that sits outside jazz.

On gear, he played Gibson Les Paul and ES-335 guitars and a Yamaha SA-1000 early on, and from the mid-1980s worked with the guitar maker P-Project on signature models. Their distinguishing feature is a single-coil, single-coil, humbucker, single-coil pickup layout, sometimes called "Wada wiring", built so that he could cover both the Fender-style rhythm sound and the Gibson-style solo sound on one instrument, with the single coils active and the humbucker passive.