Masaoki Terakawa (寺川正興, Terakawa Masaoki) was a Japanese bassist whose documented career runs from the Tokyo jazz scene of the early 1960s to the busiest studio schedules of the 1970s. Japanese Wikipedia, which Discogs, Wikidata and MusicBrainz repeat on this point, gives his birth as 17 December 1939 in Koishikawa, in what is now Bunkyo ward, Tokyo. He finished at Tokyo Metropolitan Shiba Commercial High School, where he played bass in the harmonica band, and worked as a salaried employee for a while before deciding it did not suit him and turning professional. At about 17 he began studying the bass with Hideto Kanai (金井英人). Those details come from a 1967 issue of Swing Journal and a 1969 magazine feature that the Japanese article cites; no interview or autobiographical statement in his own words has turned up.

The earliest entry in his Discogs credit list is not an album but a book. Modern Jazz, published by Chikuma Shobo on 25 May 1961, is a 23-page hardcover on modern jazz that came with four flexi-discs pressed by King Records. His is the first, a quintet reading of "A Night in Tunisia" with Akira Ishikawa on drums, Masao Yagi on piano, Akira Miyazawa on tenor saxophone and Akira Nakano on trumpet. He was 21. The other three flexis featured Sadao Watanabe with Kazuo Yashiro, Takeshi Inomata with Norio Maeda, and Hideo Shiraki with Hidehiko Matsumoto; the set is a snapshot of the period's working groups. In 1963 Victor's anthology LP Modern Jazz (2) (SJL-5105) gave him two more tracks, "Mr. Simms" and "Airegin", in a guitar quartet with Shungo Sawada, Masabumi Kikuchi on piano and Fumio Watanabe on drums.

Japanese Wikipedia traces his path through the groups of the guitarist Shungo Sawada (the Double Beats), Akira Miyazawa, Konosuke Saijo's quartet and Masao Yagi's trio before the George Otsuka Trio. The surviving records bear out part of that chain. Sawada is on the 1963 anthology above, and Yagi's Modern Jazz Blue Mood (Columbia JPS-5048, August 1965) puts him in a sextet with Miyazawa on tenor saxophone and flute, the trumpeter Norihiko Kitazato, the guitarist Toru Konishi and the drummer George Otsuka, twelve standards from "Cry Me a River" to "April in Paris". The bass and drum pairing that defined his best-known jazz work was already in place two years before the first Otsuka trio album. No album with Saijo's quartet appears in his credits; the only Saijo records that list him are from 1984.

The trio was Otsuka on drums, Hideo Ichikawa on piano and Terakawa on bass, and they recorded three albums in as many years. Page 1 was cut in front of an audience at 7 p.m. on 14 October 1967 at Teichiku Kaikan Studio and issued by Takt (JAZZ-14): seven tracks, among them Ichikawa's "Page One" and "Potato Chips", "Bye Bye Blackbird" and Charlie Parker's "Blues for Alice". Page 2 was recorded on 22 July 1968 and released that September on Columbia (XMS-10002-CT), five tracks led by a 14-minute "On Green Dolphin Street". Last Summer (Page 3) followed in November 1969 (XMS-10021-CT), with Ichikawa moving to organ and Terakawa to electric bass; its title piece is credited jointly to Otsuka, Ichikawa and Terakawa, the one writing credit he holds on a jazz record. Columbia issued two 7-inch EPs under the trio's name in June 1970, Last Summer (YSS-10046-CT) and Hot Cha (YSS-10047-CT), and Teac put the same trio on open-reel tape in 1970 (KTC-5003) and 1971 (ATP-2012). Before any of that, the Otsuka trio was the rhythm section behind Miyazawa on side A of Now's the Time (Takt JAZZ-3), recorded on 13 January 1967.

The trio is also where he turns up in the Swing Journal anthologies. On Swing Journal All Stars '67 (Takt JAZZ-4, recorded April and May 1967) he plays track A2 with Otsuka, Hidehiko Matsumoto and Terumasa Hino. On the 1968 volume it is A2 again, "The Time Machine", six and a half minutes with Matsumoto, Otsuka and Ichikawa. The live double LP All Japan Jazz Festival '69, recorded by the magazine's all-stars at Tokyo's Koseinenkin Hall, has the trio on "Sea View", and on 28 and 29 August 1970 he played "Freedom Jazz Dance" with Otsuka, Ichikawa and Kiyoshi Sugimoto at Summer Jazz in Tokyo, recorded live in Hibiya Park. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the magazine's 1971 dictionary of Japanese jazz musicians, says he came second among bassists in the Swing Journal readers' poll for 1969, and that the magazine praised his clear pitch, solid technique and feeling for song. Tom Lord's discography, as cited by German Wikipedia, lists fifteen jazz and fusion sessions for him between 1960 and 1978.

From 1968 he also worked as a studio player, and the Discogs list shows how quickly the two careers overlapped. In April 1968 he was one of three bassists, with Isao Eto and Jun Suzuki, on Jazz Rock Relax, recorded at Sogetsu Hall under Norio Maeda. In 1969 and 1970 he was the bassist of Akira Ishikawa's Count Buffaloes on Soul & Rock, Exciting Drums African Rock Party and Electrum, alongside Hiromasa Suzuki, Takeru Muraoka and Sugimoto, and he stayed with the band's records through Get Up!, Back to Rhythm, Take Me to Disco and Emergency in 1975 and 1976. He is credited on records by Martha Miyake (My Favorite Songs, 1970, with Yuji Ohno at the piano), the singer-songwriter Jun Fukamachi (A Portrait of a Young Man, 1971), Maki Asakawa (Maki II, 1971), Kimio Mizutani (A Path Through Haze, recorded 7 June 1971) and Love Live Life, the studio group whose Love Will Make a Better You was cut on 5 and 7 February 1971 with Akira Fuse singing. Later credits include Kiyoshi Sugimoto's Our Time (1975, track B1, "Take My Blues!!"), Shigeko Toya and Masaru Imada's She Cries (recorded 22 to 24 November 1978) and Yuji Ohno's James Dean (1977).

The work for which a wider Japanese public knows the name is largely off the jazz shelf. Japanese Wikipedia lists him on kayokyoku hits such as Kiyohiko Ozaki's "Mata Au Hi Made", Kayoko Moriyama's "Shiroi Cho no Samba" and Akiko Wada's "Ano Kane o Narasu no wa Anata", and on the theme songs of a long run of anime and tokusatsu series. Most 1970s singles of this kind printed no performer credits, so those attributions rest on the article's list. The Discogs credits are firmer, and they include the Space Battleship Yamato score albums for Columbia from 1977 to 1982, where he is on electric bass for composer Hiroshi Miyagawa. The same article describes a distinctive style, heavy on glissandi and running up and down two octaves, which it calls the "elevator" technique (エレベーター奏法). It also quotes the arranger Nozomi Aoki (青木望), writing in the booklet of the 1977 Toshiba album Evergreen, who remembered him as a man who loved baseball, golf, mahjong and drinking, stylish and fond of refined, elaborate things.

His own name appears on the front of only a handful of records, and none is a jazz album in the usual sense. In 1970 Crown issued three Bass Bass Bass sets under the billing 寺川正興とニュービート (Masaoki Terakawa and New Beat), popular-song programmes built on his electric bass, one of them a double LP shared with Natsuki Koyama. The record that comes closest to jazz is Bass And Drums (Union ULP-1005, 1970), three players, two basses and drums, with Masanaga Harada and the drummer Hajime Ishimatsu playing twelve pop and rock hits of the day. Discogs tags it Jazz, Jazz-Funk and Jazz-Rock.

The credits continue into the mid 1980s. He is among the bassists of the 1984 Sing Along Standard Jazz box for CBS/Sony, with Yasuo Arakawa, Akira Okazawa and Kunimitsu Inaba, on Martha Miyake's 1984 Yesterday / More with the guitarist Shoji Yokouchi and, as a guest, the tenor saxophonist Konosuke Saijo, and and in the CBS/Sony Jazz All Stars on the four-CD Digital Jazz Standards Collection 50 (November 1985), the latest of his 1980s credits. Japanese Wikipedia also lists his stage and television engagements, among them PARCO Theatre's Showgirl series, NHK's Ongaku wa Koibito (April 1992 to March 1993) and the 1993 musical Moonlit Club, in which he appeared in the role of a jazz bassist.

Reference works list him as deceased but do not agree on when. Discogs, Wikidata and MusicBrainz give 2001, and the body of the Japanese Wikipedia article says he passed away around 2001, citing a 2016 book on Showa-era anime and tokusatsu songs published by Disk Union. The same article's opening line gives 2 February 2005, a date that entered the article in 2022 and that the article's own body text contradicts. No obituary or dated notice that settles the question has been found, so no date of death is given here.

Terakawa is the bassist on the Otsuka trio's three Takt and Columbia albums, which Discogs tags Post Bop, Modal and Soul-Jazz, and the Count Buffaloes records he played on are tagged Jazz-Rock and Jazz-Funk. Discogs lists him on 118 releases, and 89 of them carry a Jazz tag; the other 29 are rock, pop, folk, anime and stage-and-screen records. The Jazz-tagged releases outnumber the rest in every period up to 1980: all 20 entries from 1960 to 1969 are Jazz-tagged, 39 of 51 from 1970 to 1974, and 12 of 21 from 1975 to 1979, with the balance tipping to an even split in the early 1980s. The competing identity, the session player on kayokyoku, rock and anime records, is real and runs through the 1970s, but the earliest and best-attested credits are jazz and Japanese Wikipedia classes him as a jazz bassist, so that is how he is treated here.

What the sources say about his playing is consistent. The 1971 Swing Journal dictionary praised his clear intonation, firm technique and "song feeling", and the glissando-heavy lines that run two octaves up and down became his signature in the studio. The records show a switch of instrument across 1969: the trio's 1967 and 1968 albums list him on bass, the Last Summer (Page 3) credit reads bass and electric bass, and most of the studio credits from 1969 onward specify electric bass.