Masahiko Togashi grew up in a musical household — his father was a double-bassist in a swing jazz ensemble — and was drumming in his father's band as a child. He began playing professionally in 1954, at fourteen, and by the mid-1960s was working in Sadao Watanabe's group. By the late 1960s he had become one of the handful of musicians, alongside Masahiko Satoh, Masayuki Takayanagi, and Yosuke Yamashita, credited with shaping Japanese free jazz into its own distinct movement rather than an import of the American form — a period that also produced a 1969 session with trombonist Hiroshi Suzuki, billed to the Hiroshi Suzuki – Masahiko Togashi Quintet.

In January 1970, he lost the use of his legs in an accident. Neither his own Discogs biography nor the English Wikipedia entry — the two most reliable accounts of his life — specify what happened. What both agree on is the aftermath: he set aside the drum kit, working in percussion for a period, then built a new way of playing the instrument suited to his changed circumstances, and returned to the kit roughly eighteen months later.

The records that followed are the ones that built his international reputation. Song for Myself (1974) was his first leader date after the accident. Story of Wind Behind Left (1975) is cited by reissue labels as the turning point of his post-accident writing, and Spiritual Nature, released the same year, became — by his own account — his best-known record in Japan. From there his catalog widened rapidly: Guild for Human Music (1976), a 1979 session in Paris with Don Cherry and Charlie Haden, and a long run of duo recordings with Steve Lacy spanning the early 1980s into the mid-1990s. He recorded with Gary Peacock and Masahiko Satoh across the three-volume Wave series (1987-88), with pianist Richard Beirach repeatedly from the late 1970s on, and with Mal Waldron and Paul Bley.

He stayed rooted in the Japanese scene throughout. He and Yosuke Yamashita worked as a standing duo (Kizashi, 1980-81). He recorded twice with Isao Suzuki (1979, 1986), and appeared alongside Terumasa Hino and Richard Beirach on Ayers Rock (1985) and, with Masabumi Kikuchi added, Triple Helix (1993). As his condition worsened further, he retired from active performance in 2002 and devoted himself to composition and painting. He died on August 22, 2007, in Kanagawa, at 67.

His catalog has continued to grow since his death: the label Studio Songs issued a string of previously unreleased duo tapes with Yuji Takahashi and Masayuki Takayanagi through the 2010s, and My Wonderful Life — Togashi Masahiko Ballad Collection (2017) gathered Satoh, Watanabe, Hino, Kohsuke Mine and Yamashita to record his compositions after he was gone.

Togashi's playing is closely associated with the use of silence and space as compositional material rather than as absence — an approach that hardened after 1970, when his changed relationship to the instrument pushed him toward a more spare, percussion-forward vocabulary. His long duo partnership with Steve Lacy, an American saxophonist working in a similarly reduced, conversational idiom, is the clearest documented expression of that aesthetic.