Hiroshi Hatsuyama (初山博) is a Japanese jazz vibraphonist who also plays marimba and chromatic harmonica. Discogs gives his birth as March 1, 1948, in Chiba. Vibes players have always been thin on the ground in Japanese jazz, and the label that reissued his only leader album calls him a valuable presence in that small field, a player whose colour on records by Fumio Itabashi, Koichi Matsukaze, Yoriyuki Harada and Shoji Aketagawa is reason enough to take him seriously.

That leader album is Smile, recorded on June 7, 1977 at Aketa no Mise, the jazz club in Nishi-Ogikubo, Tokyo, run by the pianist Shoji Aketagawa, who also ran the independent label that issued it, Aketa's Disk (catalogue AD-4). The sleeve calls him the player of "melancholy vibes" (哀愁のヴァイブ). The core band was a quartet: Hatsuyama on vibraphone, Atsushige Muraishi on guitar, Haruo Ogoshi on bass and Koji Kushima on drums. Three guest pianists took a share of the tracks: Itabashi, Kazuhide Motooka and Toru Tsuzuki, whose composition "Midday Moon" is on the record. The programme is seven pieces. Milt Jackson's "Bags' Groove" opens it, then "For Heaven's Sake," Charlie Chaplin's "Smile," Tsuzuki's "Midday Moon," Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood," Hatsuyama's own "Bb Blues" and Quincy Jones's "Eyes of Love." Aketagawa designed the sleeve. The album went back into circulation on July 24, 2019, when Octave-Lab issued it on CD for the first time as part of a limited reissue series of early Aketa's Disk titles.

Smile was his first album as a leader, and the rest of his listed work is sideman work, much of it in Tokyo studios at the turn of the 1980s. He is the vibraphonist on Itabashi's Nature, recorded March 13 to 15, 1979 at Nippon Columbia's 1st Studio in Tokyo, a session with Yoshio Otomo on soprano saxophone and two drummers, Kenichi Kameyama and Ryojiro Furusawa. On May 9 and 11, 1981 he recorded Good Nature for Trio Records in Matsukaze's quartet, with Hideaki Mochizuki on bass and Takeo Moriyama on drums. One of its tunes, "Under Construction," has since been anthologised on Gilles Peterson's Shibuya Jazz Classics (2003), Jazzman's Spiritual Jazz 8 (2018) and the Solid Records compilation Scenery of Japanese Jazz (2020). Between August 20 and October 6, 1981, at Nippon Columbia's studios, he is credited on Yoriyuki Harada's Miu with vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, xylophone and harmonica, alongside the drummers Sabu Toyozumi and Furusawa.

His other early-1980s credits run well outside the straight-ahead frame. He is on two records by the vocalist Eri Ohno for Nippon Columbia's Better Days imprint, Eri (1980) and Good Question (1981). He appears on Riviera (recorded March 11 and 12, 1981) by the guitarist Yoshiaki Miyanoue's group Smokin', on Touch of Love, Miyanoue's album with the organist Jimmy Smith (recorded September 26 and 29, 1981 at AOI Studios), and on Smokin's Kuroi Hitomi no Natalie (黒い瞳のナタリー, recorded April 1983). In 1982 he was the vibraphone and marimba player on the album credited to the Kidnaping Blues Band, on which Yosuke Yamashita is credited as conductor, producer and pianist and Kiyoshi Sugimoto plays guitar; Discogs files the record under fusion, bossa nova and soundtrack. On the flautist Tamami Koyake's Someday (1982) he plays marimba and violin on one track, with Itabashi on piano and Furusawa on drums. His last credit of that decade is Aketagawa's Nojiri no Tasogare (recorded September 17, 1985), on harmonica and vibraphone with the leader on piano.

Wikipedia's list of past performers at the Asahikawa Live Jam festival places him at its first edition, on August 3, 1986 at Kamui Ski Links in Hokkaido, as a guest of the Otomo-Kusumoto Quintet, with Hiroshi Fukumura billed beside him. That is a festival listing rather than a recording credit, so it is given here as reported. The same encyclopedia's credit list for Soul Flower Union's 2001 compilation Ghost Hits 95-99 names him on vibraphone on one track.

Later credits lean on the harmonica. He plays it on 玉城一美's Tinin (天縁, 1997), recorded in Okinawa and Tokyo with Kazutoki Umezu as producer, arranger and saxophonist, and on the 1999 soundtrack to the film Kujaku, on which Itabashi is credited with composing, arranging and playing piano, Hiroaki Katayama plays tenor saxophone and Natsuki Tamura trumpet. In the 2010s he turned up on solo albums by the rock musician Shintaro Sakamoto, formerly of Yura Yura Teikoku: vibraphone on two tracks of How to Live With a Phantom (2011), where he also plays chromatic harmonica on the title song, and vibraphone on four tracks (two of them instrumental versions) of Let's Dance Raw (2014).

His one leader album places him in the Milt Jackson line of the jazz vibraphone: it opens with Jackson's "Bags' Groove" and runs through standards, a blues of his own and a Quincy Jones ballad. The reissue label sums the playing up as sometimes bluesy, sometimes swinging, filled throughout with a beautiful ring, and the sleeve's "melancholy vibes" tag fits a programme built on slow-burning blues feeling and Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood."

Where he is most distinctive is range. The credits show him working with very different bands: the modal quartet of Matsukaze's Good Nature (classed on Discogs as modal and avant-garde jazz), the post-bop and modal session of Itabashi's Nature, Harada's Miu (classed as free jazz and fusion, and the record where he alone covers vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, xylophone and harmonica), Jimmy Smith's soul-jazz organ date with Miyanoue, the vocal records of Eri Ohno (Good Question is filed under disco and city pop), and finally the indie-rock settings of Shintaro Sakamoto's albums. The harmonica is a second voice that surfaces from the mid-1980s onward, on Aketagawa's 1985 album, on the 1997 Tamaki record and on the 1999 film soundtrack.