Yuji Ohno (大野雄二, Ōno Yūji) wrote the theme to Lupin III, one of the best-known pieces of Japanese television music, and he was a jazz pianist before he was any of that. He taught himself jazz as a teenager, turned professional while still a student at Keio University, recorded with Terumasa Hino, Hiroshi Suzuki and Masahiko Togashi in the late 1960s, and in his last quarter-century led a jazz trio and the Lupintic Five and Lupintic Six combos that played his screen music as working jazz. He passed away at home in Tokyo on 4 May 2026, aged 84.

He was born on 30 May 1941 in Atami, Shizuoka, the second son of Ichiro Ohno, who founded the inn Zuiunso Ohnoya, later the Hotel Ohnoya. He started piano in elementary school and attended middle school in Odawara. At Keio Senior High School he formed a band called Junior Light Music with his classmate Isamu Akashi and taught himself jazz at the same time. At Keio University, where he studied political science in the Faculty of Law, he played in the Keio Light Music Society big band and is said to have studied arranging with Norio Maeda. Japanese reference works group him with Masahiko Satoh and Hiromasa Suzuki as Keio's "three crows" of student jazz pianists; that grouping comes from biographical accounts rather than from any shared recording.

On the recommendation of Takeshi Shibuya he joined clarinetist Koji Fujika's quintet and became a working professional before he graduated. He then played in drummer Hideo Shiraki's group, and his first record appearance was on Hideo Shiraki Meets Yuzo Kayama (Toshiba TP-7135, 1966), a hard-bop set of Yuzo Kayama songs on which he played piano beside Terumasa Hino on trumpet, Jiro Inagaki on tenor saxophone and Kunimitsu Inaba on bass. He formed the Yuji Ohno Trio soon afterwards.

The late 1960s put him on some of the most important Japanese jazz records of the decade. On 16 and 17 November 1967 he was the pianist on Terumasa Hino's first album as a leader, Alone, Alone and Alone (Takt), with bassist Kunimitsu Inaba and Hino's brother Motohiko Hino on drums. On 20 January and 3 February 1969 he recorded Variation with trombonist Hiroshi Suzuki and drummer Masahiko Togashi, with Tetsuo Fushimi on trumpet and Jun Suzuki on bass, a record Discogs files under free improvisation and which Suzuki's own profile describes as one of the first Japanese albums built on newly composed, freely improvised material.

His own trio was captured at a live jazz workshop on 20 May 1970 at Yamaha Hall in Ginza, released by Victor as Trio by Trio + 1. The bill was three trios and one singer: Yosuke Yamashita's trio with Takeo Moriyama on drums, trumpeter Itaru Oki's trio, Ohno's trio with Takashi Mizuhashi on bass and Kazuyoshi Okayama on drums, and Kimiko Kasai. Alongside the free-jazz sides, Ohno's trio played "Autumn Leaves," "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" and "Get Out of Town" and two of his own pieces, "Kenny's Moods" and "Theme of the Unknown People." Later that year, on 16 September, he was the pianist on Kasai's own live album Just Friends from the same hall, with Takashi Mizuhashi on bass and Tetsujiro Obara on drums.

Around 1970 he stepped back from regular trio work to write music for television commercials, then television drama and film, though he kept making jazz records. He recorded Mr. Happy-Gon with the trio in 1971 (bassist Yoshio Ikeda, drummer Kazuyoshi Okayama), and RCA issued it in 1973. In December 1974 he arranged and conducted a bossa nova session for the singer Sonia Rosa, Spiced with Brazil, with Tsuyoshi Yamamoto at the piano and Isoo Fukui on acoustic bass. In May 1975 the trio backed the singer Ann Young on the standards album As Well Be Spring (Columbia), and in August 1975 he recorded the live jazz-funk record Sound Adventure Act.1 at Shinjuku Kosei Nenkin Hall, released that December.

Film and television made him famous. His score for Kon Ichikawa's The Inugami Family (1976) won the Mainichi Film Concours music award. In 1977 he took over the music for the second Lupin III television series (the first, in 1971, had been scored by Takeo Yamashita), and the same year scored the film Proof of the Man. He went on to score The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), the Space Adventure Cobra series (1982), the NHK travel programme Small Journey, and the music for the 24-Hour Television charity broadcast from its first edition in 1978. For the Lupin III work he used the studio name You & The Explosion Band, which is a production credit rather than a fixed group. He wrote a new version of the "Lupin III Theme" for each new series and called it his life's work.

From 1999 he returned to jazz under his own name. Lupin the Third "Jazz" (VAP, 21 October 1999) was credited to the Yuji Ohno Trio and put the screen themes into a small-group setting alongside standards, with Yoshio Suzuki on bass, Kenichiro Murata on drums, Kiyoshi Sugimoto on guitar and Joh Yamada on alto saxophone. It started a series of "Jazz" albums that ran into double figures, among them The 2nd, Another "Jazz", Bossa & Fusion, Plays the "Standards", Christmas, Cool for Joy and For Lovers Only. In the 2000s the trio had Yosuke Inoue on bass and Yoshihito Eto on drums, and in 2006 it grew into Yuji Ohno & Lupintic Five, with Eto, bassist Masayuki Tawarayama, guitarist Satoshi Izumi, saxophonist Hisatsugu Suzuki and trumpeter Keiji Matsushima on The 10th New Flight. That year's Seven Days Rhapsody soundtrack added Takeru Muraoka on alto and baritone saxophones and clarinet. The Lupintic Five made about twenty releases, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2014 and was succeeded in 2016 by Lupintic Six, with drummer Yasushi Ichihara in the group. In 1981 he had also played piano and arranged for Jiro Inagaki's straight-ahead date Jazzy.

A new Yuji Ohno Trio formed in March 2016 with Ichihara on drums and Makoto Uemura on bass. It made Let's Fall in Jazz (2017) and Let's Fall in Jazz Again (2019). A report on its November 2017 concert at Motion Blue Yokohama lists a two-set programme of standards, among them "C Jam Blues," "A Foggy Day" and "Cry Me a River," alongside his own pieces and a closing "Theme from Lupin III." The trio's set at Blue Note Tokyo on 26 February 2022 was released in 2024 as Lupin the Third Jazz at Blue Note Tokyo 2022.2.26.

He was hospitalised in March 2022 and rested from performing, then returned to the stage on 30 May 2024 with Lupintic Six and the Fujikochans at Billboard Live Tokyo. After that he concentrated on arranging and producing. In 2024 he received an achievement award at the Tokyo Anime Award Festival, and Columbia issued a two-track Record Store Day Japan release, Speak Low, credited to Ann Young and the Yuji Ohno Trio. He passed away at 6:08 a.m. on 4 May 2026 at his home in Tokyo, of old age, peacefully in his sleep; his agency announced it on 13 May, a private funeral had been held, a farewell gathering was planned for a later date, and a live show he had produced for 30 May, his 85th birthday, was announced to go ahead as scheduled.

Ohno's piano style was mainstream and swinging, rooted in the standards and the trio format he learned at Keio, and it stayed there whatever else he was doing. His 1970s records show the range: a trio set of standards and originals on Mr. Happy-Gon, a vocalist's session of standards with a Latin lean on As Well Be Spring, and the electric, groove-led Sound Adventure Act.1, which Discogs files under jazz-funk and whose track list runs from "Too High" and "Lady Marmalade" to Horace Silver's "Nica's Dream."

Most of the catalogue under his name is screen music, and listeners coming to him from jazz should know that going in. But the screen music is itself built from jazz materials: big-band brass, jazz-funk rhythm sections, bossa nova, and a theme that he treated as a vehicle for improvisation, rearranging it for each new series and each new band. The "Jazz" series and the Lupintic Five records are where that becomes literal, with the Lupin themes played by a small working band next to Ellington and Rodgers and Hart. A reviewer of his 2017 Yokohama concert wrote that Ohno regards jazz as cool, fun and impossible not to love.

He was not primarily a free player. His appearances on Variation and on the Hino, Shiraki and Inagaki records place him inside the Japanese modern-jazz scene of the 1960s, but his own records stayed close to the song form, and the repertoire he was still playing in his mid-seventies was "Autumn Leaves," "C Jam Blues," "A Foggy Day" and "Cry Me a River." He is a different musician from the trumpeter Shunzo Ohno.