Ryojiro Furusawa (古澤良治郎) was born in Sendai on September 5, 1945, and kept a Sendai accent for the rest of his life, through decades of living in Nishi-Ogikubo, the western Tokyo neighbourhood that was home to Aketa's, the club and label where much of his later work was made. He trained on drums and piano, moved to Tokyo at eighteen, and graduated from the percussion department of the Kunitachi College of Music. As a student he already played often with the pianist Fumio Itabashi, and in 1969, at twenty-four, he joined the group of the pianist Takehiro Honda, which is where Japanese sources date the start of his professional career.

Two live trio recordings made with Honda in 1974 have been issued long after the fact. One was taped on June 27, 1974 at the club USA in Kagoshima and released in 2007 as Live at Kagoshima USA Vol.1 "Oleo"; the other was recorded in Oita on July 4, 1974 and came out in 2020 as Live 1974. Hideaki Mochizuki is on bass in both. The 1970s then fill with sideman work for the people who made up the Tokyo scene: he is credited on drums on a 1973 comedy flexi-disc by the Yosuke Yamashita trio, and Japanese sources list the Yamashita trio among the groups he played in; he recorded A Head Wind with trombonist Shigeharu Mukai's quintet for Columbia in August 1975; and on November 21, 1975, in a classroom at Chuo University, he was the drummer on Koichi Matsukaze's first record as a leader, At the Room 427, which opens with a twenty-minute "Acoustic Chicken." The same title opens his own first album as a leader, where he holds the composer credit.

That album was You Wanna Rain, issued by Frasco in 1976 under the name Furusawa Ryojiro Quartet featuring Shigeharu Mukai. The quartet was Furusawa, Tomoki Takahashi on tenor and soprano saxophones, Toshiyuki Daitoku on piano and electric piano, and Hideaki Mochizuki on bass, with Mukai on trombone. Racco followed on Union Records in 1977 (recorded June 9 and 11 at Teichiku Kaikan Studio) with the same four, and Spicy Islands (Union, 1978) widened the group to include Toshiyuki Honda on alto saxophone and flute and the guitarists Koichi Hiroki and Motonobu Ohde. In February 1978 he was also the drummer on Matsukaze's second record, Earth Mother, with Tamio Kawabata on bass and Daitoku on piano and Fender Rhodes.

From 1979 he made his leader records for Better Days, a Nippon Columbia imprint. In March 1979 he was one of two drummers, with Kenichi Kameyama, on Itabashi's Nature. Kijimuna (January 1980) was his first Better Days album as a leader, and on April 27, 1980 he was recorded live at Toshi Center Hall in Tokyo for the double album 12,617.4 km: The World of Ryojiro Furusawa, with a long list of guests: Toshiyuki Honda, Takeo Moriyama as a second drummer, Kazumi Watanabe on guitar, Yamashita on piano, Mukai, and the folk singer Kan Mikami. The harmonica player Lee Oskar joined him for Ano Koro (recorded July 13 to 17, 1981, with Watanabe on guitar) and for Friendly, taped live at Pit Inn in Roppongi on March 24, 1982. Tamaniwa, titled Once In A While in English, came in April 1983 with Kohsuke Mine on saxophones, Mukai, and the singer Minako Yoshida writing the chorus parts and lyrics.

A second, longer partnership ran alongside the jazz work. Furusawa played drums for the singer and guitarist Kan Mikami for decades. Discogs lists him on Mikami's 1974 album Bang!; Shokugyo, recorded live on June 9, 1979 in Iwate, was issued in 1987 in an edition of 1,000; and the duo made Dereki in 2007 and Buriki (Tin) for P.S.F. Records in 2008. He also worked with Maki Asakawa, Kiyoshiro Imawano and others in the folk and rock world, produced two albums by the band Shang Shang Typhoon (上々颱風) in 1993 and 1994, and contributed to the music for Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko in 1994.

The jazz and improvised work continued. He was the drummer in Kohsuke Mine's quintet on Major to Minor (recorded in April and August 1993 at Body & Soul in Aoyama), and is credited on its 1995 and 1997 follow-ups. He played percussion and melodica on Tetsu Saitoh's Tetsu Plays Piazzolla in 1990, and he co-produced Infinity (1990), the memorial album for the tenor saxophonist Kazunori Takeda, recorded at Aketa's on January 26, 1989, and issued after Takeda's death in August of that year. On July 7, 1993 at Shinjuku Pit Inn he played in a quartet with the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, the flute player Yukihiro Isso and the bassist Tamio Kawabata; Vier Tiere came out the following year on Clockwise. He was the drummer in the quartet of the trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, with Satoko Fujii on synthesizer and Takayuki Kato on guitar, and the session of October 28, 2003 became the album Exit.

His own bands in the last fifteen years were looser and more communal. The group ね. (the single syllable "ne") recorded for Aketa's Disk in 1996 with the percussionist Mika Fujinoki and the saxophonist Kenta Tsugami, and returned with Live At Aketa in 2006. His larger band Daiohjo, with twelve musicians credited, made Mou sugu shinimasse (roughly "I'll be dead soon") for P-Vine in 1998, using banjo, balafon, blues harp and two saxophones. He was the subject of a Fuji TV documentary in 1999 and acted in a one-man play in 2004. In early January 2011 he played four nights, from the 4th to the 7th, at Aketa's. He passed away on January 12, 2011, of heart failure, at the age of 65, on the same day of the year that Takehiro Honda had died in 2006. A January concert called the Furusawa Ryojiro Special is held each year in his memory, with musicians who played with him.

Furusawa's records fall into four distinct zones, and the sleeves show the shifts. The first is the 1976 to 1978 band music: You Wanna Rain, Racco and Spicy Islands are tenor-and-soprano, electric piano and trombone records with long pieces (12:25 and 10:21 on the first, 20:02 on the Matsukaze set); Discogs tags You Wanna Rain Modal, Fusion and Post Bop, and Spicy Islands Latin Jazz, Jazz-Funk and Fusion. The second is the Better Days period from 1980 to 1983, where the guitar and keyboard lineup, the harmonica of Lee Oskar and the chorus arrangements of Minako Yoshida pull the music toward reggae and dub, which is how Discogs tags Ano Koro and Friendly (Fusion, Dub, Rocksteady) and Tamaniwa (Reggae, Fusion, Jazz-Funk). The third is free improvisation, found in Vier Tiere with Brötzmann, the 2006 Otoya-Kintoki date with the saxophonist Eiichi Hayashi and the guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, and the two-drummer Duo Live At Shibuya Lush with Akira Sotoyama. The fourth is the song world around Kan Mikami and the ne. and Daiohjo bands, where a drummer who also sings and plays keyboards and melodica is at the centre of a small community rather than a rhythm section.

His own tune titles run to animals and weather: "Acoustic Chicken," "Snake Walk," "Wolf Fish," "Wan-Nyago," "June Rain," "Burning Cloud," "Peak Wind." The Japanese word racco (ラッコ), the title of the 1977 album, means sea otter, and the cover shows one. The title of the 1980 live album is a distance, 12,617.4 km, and the sleeve is a map of Japan dotted with cartoon portraits of the drummer himself, an unusually playful way of presenting a double live LP.

What holds all of this together is the setting. Furusawa lived and worked around Nishi-Ogikubo, recorded often for Aketa's Disk, and surrounded himself with the same circle of players across forty years: Mochizuki, Takahashi, Daitoku, Kawabata, Ohkuchi, Hiroki and Ohde, with Mukai and Kohsuke Mine as the horn voices. The reissue compilations J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan (2018 and 2021) credit him, but the catalogue is broader than that tag suggests: it reaches from a Brötzmann quartet to a reggae set with Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, and the constant is a working jazz drummer.