Shun Ishiwaka (石若駿) was born on August 16, 1992 in Kiyosato, Hokkaido, and comes from Sapporo. He began classical percussion at 13, studied percussion at the high school attached to the Tokyo University of the Arts, and graduated from the university itself, leaving with the Acanthus Music Award and the Doseikai Award. Jazz came earlier than any of that: at 12 he sat in as a guest at a live show by Terumasa Hino, the trumpeter on whose records he would later play.

His first records are piano trio dates. With bassist Hideaki Kanazawa and pianist Akira Ishii he made Tsukiyo no Tabi (Studio TLive Records, April 2010), when he was 17, then Boys in Rolls (2011), Reflection (2013) and Boys Featuring Shun (2015), the last billing his name on the sleeve. In 2012 he supplied the drumming for the jazz anime Kids on the Slope, and the soundtrack credits him on drums, with Takashi Matsunaga credited on piano. The next year he appeared on Hino's Unity -H Factor-, the first of three Hino records that credit him.

His first record as a leader came as he finished at the university. Cleanup (Somethin' Cool, December 2015) was recorded on October 19 and 20, 2015 with eight players: Akihiro Yoshimoto and Akiha Nakashima on saxophones, May Inoue on guitar, Aaron Choulai and Yusei Takahashi on piano, and Hideaki Kanazawa and Takashi Sugawa on bass. A quartet follow-up, CLNUP4, came in 2019 with Sugawa, Inoue and trumpeter Niran Dasika, and in December 2025 he released a live single marking the album's tenth anniversary.

Alongside the instrumental records he started the Songbook series in December 2016. Across seven volumes through 2026 he steps out from behind the kit to play piano and keyboards as well as drums, surrounded by a rotating cast of singers, among them Manami Kakudo, ermhoi and Sara Rector, and instrumentalists including Ryo Konishi, Shuta Nishida and Marty Holoubek. The seventh, Songbook7, appeared on August 12, 2026, co-billed with Kakudo. He also joined CRCK/LCKS, the Tokyo band whose records Discogs files under J-pop and indie pop, and made Dear Family (Verve, 2017) with the pianist Ai Kuwabara, with both credited as producers. In 2019 he was one of eight players on Blue Note Voyage, a Blue Note 80th anniversary session recorded in Tokyo in July of that year and billed under Takuya Kuroda's name first.

The projects that define him now date from 2019. Answer to Remember, whose debut came out on Sony in December 2019 with every track composed, arranged and produced by Ishiwaka, is a large band built around horns, two keyboardists and percussion, with Yusuke Sase, MELRAW, Akiha Nakashima, Tomoaki Baba, Yuya Wakai, Kota Kaihori, Marty Holoubek and Taikimen in the current lineup. Its second album, Answer to Remember II (Universal, August 2024), won the Jazz Award at the 17th CD Shop Awards, announced on March 6, 2025. SMTK, his quartet with saxophonist Kei Matsumaru, guitarist Tokutaro Hosoi and bassist Holoubek, released a mini-album and Super Magic Tokyo Karma in 2020. In June 2024 he took the band to NHK Hall for JAZZ NOT ONLY JAZZ, a concert that paired jazz arrangements with pop and hip-hop guests and was broadcast by WOWOW; a second edition followed at Tokyo International Forum on September 18, 2025.

The other half of his working life is the studio. Discogs lists him on records by Kenshi Yonezu, Gen Hoshino, Millennium Parade, Kirinji, Negicco and Masaki Suda, and he is credited as producer on two KID FRESINO albums. He is also named as an early member of Srv.Vinci, the group that preceded King Gnu, and he recorded with Yonezu on "Spinning Globe," the theme of Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron (2023). In 2023 he played the drum parts for the character Shunji Tamada in the film Blue Giant, and Discogs credits him on percussion or drums on seven tracks of Hiromi's soundtrack for it.

He has also taken the jazz side abroad and sideways. His official biography lists performances with visiting jazz musicians in Japan including Herbie Hancock, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Federico Casagrande, John Scofield and Linda Oh, alongside Jason Moran, Tony Allen and James Francies. In 2022 he presented Echoes for unknown egos at YCAM, a performance in which he played against an AI version of himself, and in 2023 he premiered his percussion concerto suite playgroundz (for percussion) with the Sapporo Symphony. On June 5 and 7, 2025 the Japan Society in New York presented Shun Ishiwaka: Jazz Transcending, a pair of concerts that included an improvised duo with the trumpeter Adam O'Farrill.

His recent records lean back toward the jazz core. Old and New Dreams: Chapter 1 (DIW, 2025) documents a December 27, 2024 trio concert at Shinjuku Pit Inn with Otomo Yoshihide on guitar and Takashi Sugawa on bass and cello, opening with "Lonely Woman." In December 2025 he released Teine with Motohiko Ichino and Kanoa Mendenhall, and Live at ALFIE "Temporal Cubic" with pianist Yusei Takahashi and Holoubek, which his official biography lists as a nominee for Best Jazz Album at the Music Awards Japan 2026. Mabui, by the Shun Ishiwaka Trio + 1, followed on September 2, 2026. He turned 34 in August.

Ishiwaka plays as a drummer who answers. In a 2024 interview with the saxophonist Tomoaki Baba he described the essence of jazz as the way a drummer responds to other players' improvisation and shapes movement in the space around it, and his own records are built accordingly: the trio and quartet dates leave room for long, conversational improvising, while the band records give the kit a composer's frame. His left-field jazz credits, from Otomo's free improvisation to Chihei Hatakeyama's ambient guitar on the two Magnificent Little Dudes albums, run alongside records that sit squarely in post-bop, such as the Sumire Kuribayashi trio date, which Discogs tags Post Bop.

What separates him from most jazz drummers of his generation is how far the pop and hip-hop work extends. He records for major names in Japanese popular music, and Answer to Remember and the Songbook records deliberately fold singer-songwriter and hip-hop material into a jazz band's vocabulary, which is why Discogs tags the former Jazz and Pop. The CRCK/LCKS records are filed as pop outright. The jazz label fits him as a player, bandleader and composer, and the CD Shop Awards Jazz Award and the Japan Society series are the clearest recognition of that side, but a good share of his recorded output sits outside the jazz catalogue.