Kunimitsu Inaba (稲葉国光, also written 稲葉國光; read Inaba Kunimitsu) is the kind of bassist whose name turns up in the credits of half the Japanese jazz records worth owning from the late 1960s onward. He was born on April 29, 1934, in Shimoda, on the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture, according to Discogs, the French national library authority record and German Wikipedia. Little has been published about his training or his first years as a professional. The earliest credits on record are from 1966, when he played on Hideo Shiraki Meets Yuzo Kayama for Toshiba, a quintet set with the drummer Hideo Shiraki, the trumpeter Terumasa Hino, the tenor saxophonist Jiro Inagaki and the pianist Yuji Ohno. A second volume followed in 1967 with the guitarist Kiyoshi Sugimoto added.

Hino is the thread that runs through the next four years. On November 16 and 17, 1967, Inaba was the bassist on Hino's first album as a leader, Alone, Alone and Alone (Takt), alongside Ohno and Hino's brother, the drummer Motohiko Hino. In August 1968 he recorded Hino=Kikuchi Quintet, cut on August 22 and 30 for the Takt Jazz Series and issued by Columbia in 1969, with the pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, the tenor saxophonist Takeru Muraoka and Motohiko Hino. Discogs singles out his work in the Kikuchi-Hino Quintet between 1968 and 1970 as what he is best known for. A memoir by the scholar Shuhei Hosokawa, published in Jazz Tokyo, recalls standing in the front row at Shinjuku Pit Inn on December 16, 1969, to hear Hino's quintet, and being asked to move aside by Inaba and Muraoka when they arrived well after the scheduled start. He is credited on electric bass on the live Hi-Nology, recorded on July 31, 1969 at Yamaha Hall in Ginza with Hiromasa Suzuki on electric piano, and on bass on Into the Heaven, recorded on February 5, 1970. German Wikipedia puts him in the Swing Journal all-star band of 1968 alongside Hino, Hiroshi Suzuki, Sadao Watanabe, Kikuchi and Masahiko Togashi, and his name is billed among the players on the 1971 Philips album from the Poll Winners Jazz Festival.

In the early 1970s he was part of the rhythm section behind The Freedom Unity, the band built around Hiroshi Suzuki and Muraoka that recorded for Toshiba, and Discogs lists him in later groups with the drummer Akira Ishikawa, including Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffaloes. On August 4, 1971, he was on stage at the Tokyo club Junk when the American tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson played with a local trio of Hideo Ichikawa on electric piano, Inaba and Motohiko Hino on drums. Milestone released the tape in the United States in 1973 as Joe Henderson in Japan, and Victor issued it in Japan as Henderson's Habiliment. AllMusic rated it 4.5 stars and DownBeat gave it four.

Visiting singers used him the same way. He recorded Misty Burton with the Dutch singer Ann Burton on March 16, 1973 (Epic), played on Abbey Lincoln's Live in Misty, taped in June 1973 at the Jazz Bar Misty in Tokyo with Hiromasa Suzuki on piano and Tetsujiro Obara on drums, and returned to Burton's side in April 1974 for By Myself Alone (East Wind), a session that also included Masahiko Satoh, Akira Miyazawa, Sadanori Nakamure and Masahiko Ozu. Helen Merrill (1970) and Irene Kral (1978) also appear in his Discogs credits, and so does the guitarist Barney Kessel, with whom he and Obara cut the direct-to-disc audiophile LP Shiny Stockings on February 22, 1977 at Pioneer Studio, pressed in a limited run of 2,500 copies for the Lob label.

The recordings under his own name begin with the one most often cited. On April 5, 1975, Inaba and Nakamure went into Aoi Studio in Tokyo and recorded Conversation for Three Blind Mice (TBM-43), eight standards for guitar and bass with no drummer. They billed themselves as the Inaba & Nakamure Duo, and that October the pair backed the singer Yoshiko Goto on A Touch of Love, cut at Epicurus Studio. Twenty years later, in four sessions in 1994, they made We'll Be Together Again (Cab Records, released in 1997), and the two met once more with Obara on drums for the trio album Gentle Three, recorded in October 2007 and released in 2008. In 1976 he was one of two bassists on Toshio Oida's It Was a Very Good Year for Three Blind Mice, and the same year he began appearing on Tam's Jazz Minus One records, a series of backing-track LPs on which Discogs credits him on six volumes. Toshiba also issued a play-along record under his own name, Pops Minus One / How To Play The Bass, with Shoji Yokouchi on guitar and Kazuo Yashiro on piano.

The late 1970s and 1980s attach him to the pianist Tsuyoshi Yamamoto. The Yamamoto trio with Inaba and Obara played the Montreux Jazz Festival and was recorded live at the Casino Montreux on July 11, 1979 (Three Blind Mice). Inaba also played on Yamamoto's Ma Memoire in 1981, recorded a piano and bass duo album with him, 二重奏 (Duo), for Vap in 1982, and played on the 1987 vocal album Soundrama "The Jazz Performance" with Song'Ko Ueno as the singer. The 1982 Vap album was produced by a Koichi Inaba; the entry for the record company Toy's Factory on Japanese Wikipedia notes, in a footnote, that its founder and president Koichi Inaba is the bassist's son. Other credits from these years include the Nagoya live album My Piccolo by Miyazawa (March 21, 1981, with Nobuyoshi Ino as the second bassist), Kunihiko Sugano's trio set Live Life (1981), Jiro Inagaki & Just Friends (1981), Masaru Imada's Planets (1977) and Seeking Blue (1978), and the Mal Waldron Trio with Motohiko Hino on drums, which accompanied the singer Sumiko Yoseyama on sessions held in December 1983.

On May 29, 1995, he played bass in the trio of the pianist Barry Harris at the Tokyo club Dug, with Fumio Watanabe on drums; the set was issued as Live at "Dug". He kept working with a younger generation. Credits include the pianist Masao Yagi on Inga (1979), Martha Miyake's What a Wonderful World (1998) and Tadayuki Harada's Midnight Sun (2002). Pianist Keiko Iwasaki's records on Little Pumpkin include him from 2003 on, and his own album Bassin' was recorded on August 5 and 6, 2010 at Crescente Studio in Tokyo with the tenor saxophonist Kohsuke Mine, Nakamure on guitar, Yamamoto and Iwasaki splitting the piano chair, and Hideo Sekine on drums. In 2017 he played on Iwasaki's Bach's Groove, and in 2022 on 60 x 178, credited to Meet The Legends, a quintet record with Nakamure, Iwasaki, the alto saxophonist Yushi Miyano and Sekine. A concert listing from September 2021 billed him with Iwasaki and the drummer Mike Reznikoff as a legendary bassist respected throughout Japan and a living witness to the history of Japanese jazz. He has no recorded death date, and the 2022 album is the most recent new recording credited to him.

Inaba is a sideman's bassist in the best sense. The pattern that repeats across more than fifty years of credits is a player a leader can hand the harmony to and not think about again, and the people who hired him say as much by how often they did: the Hino quintet, Shiraki's group, Kikuchi, Yamamoto, Nakamure, and visiting Americans such as Henderson, Kessel, Harris, Lincoln and Burton who needed a Tokyo rhythm section on short notice. He is credited on electric bass for Hi-Nology, which sits at the edge of the fusion that Hino and Hiromasa Suzuki were beginning to explore, and on acoustic bass for his own duo and trio dates.

His own records are small-group, standards-based and quiet. Conversation leaves out the drummer altogether, so the bass has to keep time, state the harmony and answer the guitar in a way that a trio would not require; a Japanese record dealer's description calls it a masterpiece duo album built on a simple guitar-and-bass arrangement. The 2007 Gentle Three and the 2010 Bassin' keep to the same repertoire: "Soul Eyes", "But Beautiful", "Pannonica", "Hi-Fly", "Alone Together".

He also worked well outside jazz. Discogs credits him as a member of the backing band of the singer Maki Asakawa on her 1972 and 1974 records, and the Japanese Wikipedia page for Yosui Inoue's Yosui II / Sentimental (1972) lists him on two tracks. He is on Moonriders' 1976 album Hi no Tama Boy and on a string of Japanese pop and singer-songwriter sessions in the 1970s and 1980s. Those sessions are a side of a career whose center is plainly jazz: every record under his own name is a jazz record, and the artists with whom he is most closely associated are jazz players.