with classmate Takehisa Kosugi. Kosugi played a tape for Tone and asked him to join their sessions. Tone was affected by Kosugi’s gesture, who seemed to show no regard for Tone’s lack of formal musical training. He joined their group, buying a saxophone from Kosugi and a Sony open reel tape recorder. Chieko Shiomi, Genichi Tsuge, Mikio Tohima and Yumiko Tanno also joined, making Tone the only member not enrolled at Geidai. Mizuno’s house became an important meeting place for the group. The group’s experimental endeavors were further informed by the young ethnomusicologist Fumio Koizumi, who became a part-time faculty member at Geidai in September 1959. As historian William Marotti describes, “The different ‘ethnic’ instruments were each bound to a complex performance tradition outside of a western orchestral frame—and thus provided a variety of rich alternatives to the latter’s conceptual dominance of music with its particular, narrow, and oppressive systematicity.” Tone recounts influence by Noh music, Indian music, Jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy and Kabuki music, among others. According to his own account, Tone saw music as lagging behind the experimentation present in other art forms of the time and therefore providing a rich ground for the transformative capacity of art. Tone also wrote about the group, first in August of 1960 where he emphasized the role of chance and their endeavoring in “an experiment concerning an absolutely new music.” At this time, the group also decided upon its name as “Group Ongaku,” “ongaku” meaning “music” in Japanese. As Marotti points out, this emphasis on chance was part of Tone's and the group’s exploration of a Surrealist-inspired automatism in opposition to artistic egoism. The group’s improvisational approach to collective art making therefore had wider theoretical consequences for the social import of art. Inseparable from this work is its contextualization within the massive protests against the renewal of U.S.-Japan Security treaty (abbreviated as Anpo), as seen in their performance from the van of Tone’s family’s business during the Anpo protests. Among his early influences, Tone has cited Concrete Music, John Cage’s experiments with sound, Jackson Pollock’s action painting, and Art autre/Art informel. A former literature major, Tone became a fixture within the Japanese contemporary art scene. Tone was involved with the Neo Dadaism Organizers group, attending and sometimes participating in their events such as those conducted at Masunobu Yoshimura’s “White House” in Shinjuku, In the early sixties he