Teru Sakamoto (坂元輝, Sakamoto Teru) is a Tokyo jazz pianist and teacher whose records have appeared under two names. As the Teru Sakamoto Trio he made four instructional LPs for Victor in 1977 and 1978, a studio album in 1983, and a live album, Farewell My Johnny (海を見ていたジョニー), recorded in a small-town jazz café in 1980. As the Terry Herman Trio, a name Nippon Columbia gave his group, he made a long series of jazz piano albums of classical themes, film music, chanson, Beatles songs and Japanese pop between 1973 and 1996. Discogs gives his birth year as 1949 and his birthplace as Echizen, Fukui Prefecture; a full birth date has not been published. One point of spelling matters when searching for him: the second character of the family name is 元, not 本. He has written that retailers and even the back of the CD print 坂本 by mistake, and that 坂元 is correct. He is a different musician from Ryuichi Sakamoto.

By his own account he decided in the third year of junior high school to become a musician, and in the second year of high school to become a jazz pianist, with no guarantee that anyone would ever listen. His own profile dates his professional start to age 21, in Sadao Watanabe's Rehearsal Orchestra, and his first work with his own piano trio in Tokyo live houses to age 22. The earliest credit that can be checked in print is a live record. On 21 July 1973 the fifth Nemu Jazz Inn live record was taped, and Yamaha issued it as a promotional LP marked not for sale. Discogs credits Sakamoto on piano on two tracks, "The Plunger" and "Carnaval," in an eighteen-player big band with Sadao Watanabe credited as performer, Kazumi Watanabe on guitar, Hiroshi Fukumura and Shigeharu Mukai among the trombones, Hidefumi Toki and Kohsuke Mine among the saxophonists, and Shunzo Ohno on trumpet. The credit does not name the Rehearsal Orchestra.

The record that started his second name came when he was 23. He has described the session as one booked for a car-stereo tape label, to be sold at petrol stations, where, he supposes, an unknown pianist just past twenty was hired because a small fee would do. The director liked the result and took the tape to Nippon Columbia, and, without his knowledge, the decision was made to release it under a foreign-sounding name. It came out in 1973 as Blue Aranjuez by the Terry Herman Trio (Columbia YZ-4-N, a gatefold LP): eight jazz readings of classical pieces, among them Rodrigo's Aranjuez concerto at 10:45, the Pathetique sonata, Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu and an Etude, with Takao Neichi on bass and Takeshi Watanabe on drums. A second Columbia LP of classical themes, Blue Swan, followed in January 1975. He has written that Blue Swan never made it to CD, that he has no equipment to play the LP, and that he has hardly heard it since.

Teaching and playing ran together from the start. In 1977 and 1978 Victor issued Let's Play Jazz Piano Vols. 1 to 4 (SJX-2144 to SJX-2147) as part of its Jazz Master Series, credited to the Teru Sakamoto Trio, with Sakamoto on piano, arranging and writing the liner notes, and Masahiko Satoh credited with liner notes on all four. A Japanese dealer describes the third volume as an instructional record. Volumes 1 and 2 pair him with Tsuneo Shibata on bass and Kazunori Kondo on drums; Volume 3 uses Mitsuaki Furuno or Akira Kato on bass, Michael Kawai on drums and Kiyohiko Semba on percussion on two tracks; Volume 4 uses Furuno and Kawai. The repertoire mixes standards ("Autumn Leaves" in trio and solo versions, "Satin Doll," "Misty," "My Favorite Things," "So What") with Beyer piano-lesson pieces and the children's song "Teru-Teru Bozu," which appears on Volume 3 as "Teru-Teru Bozu (Black Keys)." That track was chosen in 2019 for BBE's J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1969-1983 (Volume 2), which credits the group as the Teru Sakamoto Trio plus One and describes the cut as sparse, minimal acoustic funk. His own profile says a book of the same title, Let's Play Jazz Piano Vol. 1, appeared when he was 28, that by his count fourteen books for the publisher Ongaku no Tomo Sha followed, now out of print, and that two more came from Chuo Art Shuppan.

The record he is now best known for was made in the autumn of 1980. On 13 October 1980 the trio played live at Johnny, a jazz café in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, named after a mid-1960s story by Hiroyuki Itsuki. With Neichi on bass and Watanabe on drums, they played four pieces: "Left Alone" (8:40), "My Favorite Things" (9:43), the children's song "Yuyake Koyake" (5:58) and "Autumn Leaves" (12:25). Sakamoto wrote that "Left Alone" recreated a scene from Itsuki's story in the café itself. It was released on the café's own Johnny's Disk Record (JD-05), produced by the café's master, Ken Terui (照井顕), with liner notes by Itsuki, Kan Mikami and Toshihiro Asakura. Sakamoto has written that the original LP was a privately made record that was never sold in ordinary shops. In 2007, 27 years after the recording, he learned from a student, who brought a newspaper clipping, that his trio had a CD out. On 10 August 2007 he found it on a Tower Records shelf in Shinjuku under a divider bearing his name, and a shop comment at Disk Union told him that collectors called the record "Kai-Joni" (海ジョニ). That CD was Ultra Vybe CDSOL-1155. A paper-sleeve HQCD edition limited to 1,000 copies followed in 2011, an LP reissue in 2017, a low-priced CD re-release in December 2018, and, by January 2026, an SACD hybrid edition in a paper sleeve, with a remastered edition on streaming services from 4 February 2026. The Japanese Communist Party newspaper Akahata ran the album in its "Kyo no Choryu" column on 10 July 2011, describing the playing as springy and carefully heartfelt, and noting that the March 2011 tsunami had swept the café away. Sakamoto adds that the bearded man photographed on the CD packaging is the café's master, not himself. Some retail copy places the café in Morioka; Discogs, Akahata and Sakamoto's own blog place the recording at Johnny in Rikuzentakata, which is the account followed here.

In parallel, the Terry Herman albums became a steady Nippon Columbia series, issued on the company's Denon label. Each took a single repertoire: classical themes (Blue Aranjuez, re-recorded 24 and 25 January 1980 and released that August, YX-7262-ND), film music (Blue Feeling, February 1981), standards (Blue Stardust, 1981), chanson (Blue Chanson d'Amour, recorded 22 and 29 September 1981), the Beatles (Blue Michelle, recorded 8 and 20 April 1982), Latin standards (Begin the Beguine, recorded 13 and 14 December 1982 and issued 21 March 1983), Japanese pop (Silhouette Romance, September 1983), songs of the new-music generation (Glass no Ringo, December 1984), a Seiko Matsuda songbook (Sweet Memories, recorded 8 to 12 March 1984), Stevie Wonder (Sunshine, October 1985) and Japanese children's songs (Nippon no Uta, December 1985). In 1986 came three albums credited to Terry Herman alone: Dandelion (songs by Yumi Matsutoya, also known as Yumi Arai), a Keisuke Kuwata songbook, and Sand Beige, a set of Japanese pop songs, among them pieces by Naoya Matsuoka ("Mi Amore") and Masayoshi Takanaka ("Ten Commandments (1984)"), played with electric guitar, electric bass, drums and synthesizer, with Sakamoto producing and playing piano. That year he also made The Man I Love with the vocalist Hatsumi Shibata (Columbia AF-7409, April 1986). Beyer Jazz followed on 21 February 1988, eleven reworkings of Beyer exercises that Sakamoto had been arranging for about a decade, and Wakaba no Koro (a Bee Gees album) on 21 June 1996. A two-disc summing-up, W Deluxe, appeared on 21 May 1987, and CD Journal's note on it described fourteen leader albums in fourteen years; Sakamoto's own profile counts nineteen albums after Blue Aranjuez. By 2014 fifteen of the titles were again available as on-demand CDs from Nippon Columbia, and many are now on Apple Music.

He kept teaching throughout. His professional profile says he taught at An Jazz School (アン・ジャズ・スクール) in Tokyo and Kyoto and also privately, and he describes about sixty years of jazz-piano teaching. He now runs Teru-sensei's Jazz Piano Classroom in Takadanobaba, Shinjuku, with individual lessons in jazz piano (centred on improvisation), harmony and jazz theory, composition and arrangement, analysis of solos and of classical piano works, jazz vocals and, more recently, online lessons, plus a Kyoto classroom under the name Dream Music Academy. His blog was still being updated in January 2026, when he wrote about the reissue of the 1980 live album, and the blog's categories include extended analysis series on Bill Evans, Gershwin, Kapustin and Hiromi Uehara.

Two ideas run through Sakamoto's recorded work: jazz as a way of reworking material that is not jazz, and the long live performance as the place where he stretches out. The Terry Herman series is built on the first. Each album chooses a repertoire outside the usual standards (a Rachmaninoff concerto, a Rodrigo concerto, Stevie Wonder, Seiko Matsuda, Japanese lullabies) and plays it as a piano trio, with rhythm sections that changed over the years: Neichi and Watanabe first, Kazuyo Yamaguchi and Takahiro Suzuki from 1982, Furuno and Ozu in 1985. Sakamoto has noted that those studio albums, with about ten tracks each, forced a limit of roughly five minutes per piece, while the live album had none. The tracks on Farewell My Johnny run from nearly six to twelve and a half minutes. Sakamoto himself describes the "Left Alone" performance as jazz played with the heart of enka, which he says jazz normally forbids.

Discogs tags the catalogue with Post Bop for the 1973 Blue Aranjuez, Modal for the 1980 live album, Latin Jazz for Begin the Beguine, and Cool Jazz and Smooth Jazz for the chanson and Seiko Matsuda records. The Terry Herman albums are also labeled Easy Listening in places, and the series is aimed at a wider audience than the live album; the jazz identity is nonetheless the one the sleeves, the Discogs genre tags and the instructional LPs all carry, and it is the one in which the Akahata column, BBE's compilation and the Japanese jazz reissue market present him. Another habit that runs through the catalogue is reworking the Beyer piano-lesson pieces as jazz: "Beyer No. 98" is on Let's Play Jazz Piano Vol. 1, "Beyer No. 90" on Fancy Jazz Piano, and the whole of Beyer Jazz, with matching sheet-music books by Sakamoto, among them Jazz Fu ni Hiku Beyer (CJ92) and Jazz Fu ni Hiku Nippon no Uta (CJ93).

No interview naming his own teachers has been published that could be found. The only mentor-level connection he cites is Sadao Watanabe's Rehearsal Orchestra, where he says he turned professional at 21.