Masaaki Hiyama (日山正明, Hiyama Masaaki) is a Tokyo-born drummer who has never released an album under his own name. Discogs lists 15 credits for him, every one as a band member or sideman, and 12 of them are Casiopea releases: he was the drummer of Casiopea from 1990 to August 1992. He was born in Tokyo on 2 September 1959; his own profile, his Instagram biography, Japanese Wikipedia, Wikidata and MusicBrainz all give that date. Much of what follows comes from a long interview he gave to the web magazine Cheer Up! WEB in November 2024, the fullest account of his life that has been published.

He says it started with television. As a primary school child he watched The Monkees Show, was drawn to its drummer, Micky Dolenz, and went to the record department of the Matsuzakaya department store in Ueno to buy Monkees LPs. Later he saw what he recalls as the farewell concert of The Tigers at the Budokan on television and was taken by Peeh (Minoru Hitomi), who drummed on a platform above the band. In junior high school a friend introduced him to soul music and he began going dancing in Roppongi discos; the records he names are Rare Earth, the Temptations, the O'Jays, the Stylistics, James Brown and the Motown catalogue, including Stevie Wonder. He had played snare drum in school ensembles, and in his upper primary years he took two or three lessons at an instrument shop in Ochanomizu, but the snare and hi-hat his grandparents bought him went into a storeroom. He began to play seriously after leaving junior high school, when he was given a drum set that came with an instructional record by Hiro Tsunoda. At about 17 he took lessons for roughly a year in the drum and percussion departments of Shobi Ongakuin, a music college, where he learned the rudiments, and around the same age he played in a Deep Purple cover band with Hideki Watanabe, later of the group C-C-B.

His route into professional work ran through Akihabara. He bought a drum kit at the LAOX instrument store there and played in amateur bands he met around it, one of which opened with four songs for a concert by Casiopea and Tokyo Otoboke Cats at Toho Seimei Hall in Shibuya. A friend who had worked as an assistant to the guitarist Ginji Ogawa played him a cassette of Ogawa's group Crosswind live, and the two started a Crosswind copy band. Ogawa heard about it, sat in on a session, and later met Hiyama by chance at a record shop and asked whether he wanted to play in Crosswind. That was 1979. According to Japanese Wikipedia, Ogawa formed Crosswind in July 1976, and it went inactive in 1984. By Hiyama's account the lineup was renewed when he became its drummer: the bassist Shigeru Watanabe, of Monta & Brothers, and the keyboardist Yuzo Hayashi were the first rhythm section with him, and when Watanabe dropped out he recommended the bassist Tatsuhiko Hizawa. The only recording of Hiyama with the group on Discogs is two previously unreleased tracks, "Itazura Risu" and "Totemo Ookina Jungle Gym," on a 2007 reissue of a live set, with Hizawa on bass.

Hizawa then brought him toward jazz. Hiyama says that when Crosswind's activity faded, Hizawa told him that the tenor saxophonist Hidehiko Matsumoto wanted a drummer who was good at sixteenth-note grooves, and that he went to an audition-style session at Matsumoto's jazz school in Sasazuka. His biographies date his joining the group to 1980. He remembers Matsumoto as a man who was never without the saxophone, strict about rhythm and about what he wanted from a drummer, and he describes himself at that point as close to an amateur in jazz. The quartet played Roppongi's Birdland every Thursday night, three one-hour stages from 8 p.m., and he says the drummer Masahiko Ozu played the first and third stages while Hiyama took the second and watched, and that Ozu gave him some advice for a time. Visitors to the room, in his recollection, included George Kawaguchi, Motohiko Hino, Lew Tabackin, the pianist Mark Soskin and the drummer Ushio Sakai, and he played with some of them. He toured the Soviet Union with Matsumoto's group in 1981. The notes on his own YouTube archive say the tour began with a concert in Khabarovsk in May, took in six cities including Moscow and Irkutsk, and returned to Khabarovsk in June; the concert of 22 June 1981, with Matsumoto on tenor saxophone, Masayoshi Yoneda on piano, Hizawa on bass, Tatsuji Yokoyama on percussion and Hiyama on drums, survives on video there.

The one commercial recording from this period that can be checked is Chi Chi (Invitation, 1982) by the pianist Mikio Masuda. Discogs credits Hiyama on drums beside Hizawa on bass and guitar, Kiyotsugu Amano (credited as Kiyotsugo Amano) on guitar and Yokoyama on percussion, with the drummer Yuichi Togashiki as a guest on three tracks. Victor reissued it on CD on 21 September 2016 in its "ADLIB presents Victor Wa-Fusion 40W" series. His YouTube archive adds live footage of the same group in November 1982, and of the singer Yasuko Agawa with a special band led by Masuda in November 1982 and January 1983, in which Amano, Hizawa and Hiyama were the guitar, bass and drums, with a horn section that included the tenor saxophonist and flautist Takeru Muraoka. The archive also holds 1983 sessions with the singer 仲村裕美 (Hiromi Nakamura), with Amano on guitar and arrangement, Hizawa on bass and Hiyama on drums. In 1983, according to his biographies, he played live with the singer Anli Sugano, and from about 1985 he worked in the trio of the pianist 西直樹 (Naoki Nishi) and in a group led by a guitarist named Kazumasa Akiyama (秋山一将), who may be the guitarist profiled here as Kazumasa Akiyama, though the sources do not say so. In 1989 he began teaching in the drum department of the Muse Ongakuin music school.

He joined Casiopea in 1990, by a long route. By his account he had been following the band since about the time Akira Jimbo replaced its first drummer, Takashi Sasaki, and a school friend's contact in the band's office got him an introduction at Roppongi Pit Inn. Jimbo was kind to him, he says, and a tape he gave Jimbo led to a place in the band of the vocalist Kusunoki, who had guested with Casiopea and shared its office, and so to a closer acquaintance with the members. Issei Noro had told him earlier, "I hear you're playing with Matsumoto, let me hear a tape sometime." Then one night Noro phoned and asked, "Want to do Casiopea?" Japanese Wikipedia says Hiyama and the bassist Yoshihiro Naruse joined together in 1990, after Tetsuo Sakurai and Jimbo left, and that members were chosen partly for their ability to keep working together, Hiyama having been in Crosswind around the time of Casiopea's debut. He was 30.

The new lineup of Noro, Minoru Mukaiya, Naruse and Hiyama recorded The Party in April 1990 at a studio in Mitaka, Tokyo, and Japanese Wikipedia says the audio and the video were captured in a single take. Pioneer LDC issued it on 25 June 1990 as a CD (PICL-1006) and as the laserdisc The Party Visual Stack, which includes a drum solo leading into a bass solo. In November 1990 came an 8 cm CD single, "Splendor" backed with "Illusion," which Japanese Wikipedia describes as a candidate theme for the 1991 Pioneer Paris-Dakar Rally. Full Colors followed on 25 May 1991, with the percussionists Carlos Kanno, Gen Date and Gen Ogami as guests on tracks 5, 7 and 9, and with a 15 minute video, Motion Picture from Full Colors. In 1991 he also drummed on Paradise Lost (CBS/Sony), an album by the composer Shigeaki Saegusa on which Discogs credits three drummers, Hiyama among them, with Naruse as one of two electric bassists and Yuji Toriyama on electric guitar. His own profile adds that he played in Saegusa's band at the opening ceremony of the World Table Tennis Championships.

In February 1992 the band went to Australia. A fan history of the band says it spent about 20 days at Gotham Studio in Melbourne, and Japanese Wikipedia gives the recording dates of Active as 30 January to 21 February 1992, with the engineer Ross Cockle and the percussionist Alex Pertout on the credits. The same fan history says the shape of the studio and the dry climate gave the room a natural echo, so his drums were recorded without digital effects. Active came out on 25 May 1992 (PICL-1036). During the stay Casiopea played a live show at The Metro in Melbourne, which was filmed for the laserdisc Made in Melbourne and recorded for the CD We Want More (PICL-1039, 25 August 1992), whose 36 minute "Time Capsule Medley" strings together passages from the band's earlier albums. Sleeve notes on the 1994 CD of the same night, also called Made in Melbourne (PICL-1070), give the date as 26 February 1992; Japanese Wikipedia says 25 February.

He left that August. Japanese Wikipedia and English Wikipedia both attribute his departure to illness, and Japanese Wikipedia dates it to August 1992; the fan history says he asked to leave and was out of drumming for a long time afterward, and his own interview says only that he rested and then resumed sessions with the guitarist Kiyotsugu Amano. Noriaki Kumagai, then 22, came in as his replacement in 1992, according to Japanese Wikipedia, and has his own profile as Noriaki Kumagai. In all, Hiyama is credited on four Casiopea albums, The Party, Full Colors, Active and We Want More, and three video works. The compilation Schedir (Pioneer LDC, 1996) collects tracks from those three studio albums, and Aguri Suzuki Selected for F-1 (1993) draws on them as well.

From 1993 he spent two years in the band of the singer Goro Noguchi. In 2001 he, Amano and the bassist Gregg Lee played as the Amano/Gregg/Hiyama Project, at Jirokichi in Koenji on 28 January, Satin Doll in Roppongi on 19 February and 4 June, King Bee in Higashi-Nakano on 18 April and Chofu GINZ on 16 June; the pianist Keiji Matsumoto joined them from February, the singer Akiko Ohara sat in during June, and the cassette recordings of those nights are on his channel, along with a 2002 single by the singer dorlis, "Daphne Leaf," with Amano arranging and Hiyama on drums. In the 2000s he also played for two years in the band of the Lilies, a former idol group, and joined the guitarist ITANI (Nozomi Itani), a Tokyo-based guitarist who returned from Germany in 1997. ITANI's own site lists Hiyama as the group's drummer from 2009 to 2015, and its album Station to Station (BQ Records BQR-2058), released on 1 November 2012, credits him on drums. A Yamaha artist-relations blog post of 4 December 2012 covers the album's release show at Silver Elephant and remarks how well his fusion-leaning approach worked against the distorted guitar rock. On 25 December 2013 the group played Otsuka Welcomeback, with the guitarist 本庄寛国 and the bassist 仁村茂 beside him, and in September 2013, ITANI's site says, Noro sat in with the group at an event. Japanese Wikipedia also lists him on Swingin' Street (SUPA Records, 2004) by the singer dorlis and on a 1983 album by Hiromi Nakamura; neither release lists him in its Discogs credits.

In the 2024 interview he says teaching now takes more of his time than playing. He gives lessons at Takagi's Home, a music shop and school in Setagaya, Tokyo, which keeps a lesson page for him, and he has an Instagram account and a YouTube channel, 日山正明Archives, which describes itself as an archive of a drummer who played a small part in the history of Japanese fusion and has uploads dated as recently as April 2026. Japanese Wikipedia reports that Warner Music Japan is issuing The Party (Audio Stack) and Full Colors on LP in October 2026, and Light in the Attic lists Full Colors (WPJL-10340) as the album's first vinyl release, naming Hiyama in its description of the lineup.

A good deal is not on the public record. He has made no album under his own name, and the Casiopea albums are the only part of his career that is documented in detail. His birthplace is given only as the city, and the dates of most of his live recordings are known only from the notes he has posted himself. As far as the sources show he is living and still teaching.

Hiyama's own account of his listening is the best guide to his playing. In the 2024 interview he names Tony Williams, Harvey Mason, Steve Gadd, Elvin Jones, Vinnie Colaiuta and Dave Weckl as drummers he still loves and as the core of how he thinks about rhythm, groove and swing. Tony Williams, Harvey Mason and Elvin Jones are profiled on this site. The piece of music he chose for the 2014 Cheer Up! feature is "What's Going On" from Donny Hathaway's live album, and he says there was a time he seriously wished he could play like Fred White on that record.

Both the sources and his own account place him on the jazz side of a fusion band. Japanese Wikipedia calls him a jazz drummer when it describes his joining Casiopea, Matsumoto's quartet is where he says he learned jazz, and a Japanese jazz and fusion blog calls him a basically jazz drummer next to his successor Kumagai, whom it hears as a more technical fusion player. The same blogger writes that his playing sat well with Naruse's, that his drum solos were plain and that he supplied fewer strokes than the band's flashier drummers, while calling him one of the writer's favourite drummers and hearing him strongly in "Domino Line" and "Black Joke" on We Want More. That is one listener's opinion, not a measure.

The recordings suggest a drummer who adapts to the leader. The Casiopea albums of 1990 to 1992 are tagged Jazz and Fusion, Smooth Jazz and Jazz-Funk on Discogs, Chi Chi is tagged Jazz and Latin, Jazz-Funk, and the Crosswind reissue Jazz and Rock, Fusion; all 15 of his Discogs credits carry the Jazz genre tag. In Active the band, by the fan history's account, set out to change its sound and style, and the engineer Ross Cockle suggested favouring a more acoustic sound. His later work with ITANI is guitar-led hard rock with a fusion edge, according to the Yamaha post.