Hiroshi Fukumura came into Japanese jazz through the side door that turned out to be the main one. He studied at the Yamaha music school run by Sadao Watanabe, and on graduation Watanabe took him straight into his own band. Fukumura stayed with him for most of the 1970s, which put a trombonist barely out of school on stage nightly with the most internationally visible musician in Japanese jazz.

His first appearance on a record sleeve was not a Watanabe date. On 26 and 29 June 1972, at CBS/Sony's 1st Studio in Tokyo, Kimiko Kasai recorded Satin Doll with Gil Evans arranging, conducting, and playing piano and electric piano on his first visit to Japan. Evans brought Billy Harper on tenor saxophone and flute and Hannibal Marvin Peterson on trumpet. The Japanese half of the band was Kohsuke Mine on alto and soprano saxophone, Masayuki Takayanagi on guitar, Yoshio Suzuki on bass, Yoshiyuki Nakamura on drums, and a two-trombone section of Hiroshi Munekiyo and Fukumura. He was 23.

The following year he stepped out as a leader, twice in one week. On 22 August 1973 his quintet recorded Morning Flight at Aoi Studio in Tokyo for Three Blind Mice, the label founded in 1970 with the stated intention of doing for Japanese players what Blue Note had done for American ones. Five days later, on 27 August, the same five musicians played Toshi Center Hall in Tokyo, and Trio Records issued that concert as Live: First Flight. The band on both was Fukumura and Shigeharu Mukai on trombones, Hiroshi Tamura on piano, Tsutomu Okada on bass and Shinji Mori on drums. The twin-trombone front line, with no trumpet to set the register against, is the defining sound of both records, and the modal, long-form writing on Morning Flight (two of its five tracks run past eleven minutes) placed him closer to the spiritual jazz current of the period than to hard bop.

Part of the decade was spent in the United States. Fukumura studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and performed and recorded with its student jazz band in 1974, then returned to Japan and to Watanabe's band.

Hunt Up Wind (Flying Disk, 1978) is the record his name travels on. Rather than fly to New York, Fukumura assembled an American rhythm section in the studio and led it: Cornell Dupree on electric guitar, Chuck Rainey on electric bass, Harvey Mason on drums, Don Grusin on acoustic piano and Rhodes, and Paulinho Da Costa on percussion. Sadao Watanabe played alto and sopranino saxophone and flute and took co-billing on the sleeve; Hiromasa Suzuki and Watanabe wrote the arrangements. The album did something unusual for a Japanese jazz record of its moment: it crossed over while it was still new. Inner City Records released it in the United States in 1980 as IC 6067, and Jazz Unlimited pressed it in Mexico in 1982. Its seventh track, "Captain Caribe," was pulled as a single, issued as a UK twelve inch on Champagne in 1980, and has been anthologised repeatedly since, including on Classic Jazz-Funk Mastercuts Volume 6 in 1996 and DJ Spinna and BBE Soundsystem's Strange Games and Funky Things Volume 5 in 2010.

He kept moving. Nice Day (Insights, 1981) was recorded across four days in May and June 1980 at Sound Inn Studio in Tokyo, and Fukumura produced, arranged and wrote it, working with Nobuyoshi Ino on bass, Shuya Sato on saxophones, Hiroki Miyano on guitar, Naoki Kitajima on keyboards, Akira Doi on drums and Yuji Imamura on percussion. He joined Native Son, the fusion band keyboardist Takehiro Honda had formed in 1978 with Kohsuke Mine on saxophone, for its American tour, documented on Coast to Coast (Live in USA) in 1980, and stayed with the group through Shining (1982) and a run of 1983 releases that included Carnival: Live at Montreux. Hot Shot followed in 1985 on the Morning label, cut with Anthony Jackson on bass, Steve Ferrone on drums, Kenny Kirkland and Mark Gray on keyboards, Sammy Figueroa on percussion, and Barry Finnerty producing and playing guitar.

The later work sits well outside the jazz-funk frame he is filed under. He appears on Lisa Ono's bossa nova albums in 1993, 1994 and 2004. On 16 June 2002, at the 11th Yamaha Jazz Festival in Hamamatsu, he played trombone in Satoko Fujii's large ensemble on the concert released as Before the Dawn, thirty years after the Gil Evans session that opened his discography. He was still playing Tokyo clubs in 2022, including a June date at Shinjuku Pit Inn, and he turned 77 in February 2026.

Fukumura's signature as a leader is the twin-trombone front line. On both 1973 albums he pairs his own horn with Shigeharu Mukai's rather than setting it against a trumpet, and the two play in unison across the heads, which gives a quintet a weight closer to a small brass section. Reviewers of Morning Flight have described his tone as bitter and his phrasing as built on its own vocabulary rather than modelled on J.J. Johnson or Bob Brookmeyer, the two reference points a Japanese trombonist of his generation would ordinarily be measured against.

The writing on the 1973 records is modal and long-form, patient enough to let eleven-minute tracks develop, and it includes a reading of Coltrane's "Cousin Mary." By 1978 he had moved decisively toward jazz-funk, and the move was a matter of personnel as much as material: he built Hunt Up Wind around an American session rhythm section and let the groove carry the trombone rather than the reverse. Nice Day in 1981 is the record where all three roles are his, since he produced, arranged and composed it, and it is the clearest statement of his own writing voice away from a borrowed idiom.

What holds the career together is range rather than a single style. The same player is credited on a Gil Evans chart in 1972, a Three Blind Mice modal date in 1973, an American jazz-funk session in 1978, a Montreux fusion set in 1983, bossa nova records in the 1990s, and a Satoko Fujii large-ensemble concert in 2002.