In 1955, according to Yoshio Mamiya himself, he began researching Japanese folk songs and composing a collection of Japanese folk songs for voice and piano. The first set of four songs from this collection was composed that year and premiered in October of the same year.

Piano Sonata No. 1 was composed in the autumn of 1955, precisely when Mamiya began his serious engagement with Japanese folk song research. It was premiered on December 19 of the same year by Hiroshi Tamura at the 3rd concert of the “Yagi no Kai” (Goat Society). According to the composer himself, when working on this piece, he did not intentionally conceive it in a folk-song style, apart from the folk-like character of the second movement, “Melody.” However, he created polyphonic music using material extracted through folk song analysis as a cyclic theme, employing techniques such as interval expansion, contraction, inversion, retrograde, and combination. At its premiere, it was performed in seven movements: Prelude, Scherzo, Melody, Canon, Chorale, Fugue, and Finale. However, the Scherzo was later discarded, resulting in a six-movement structure. Furthermore, according to Mamiya himself, the autograph manuscript went missing shortly after the premiere. Nearly 30 years later, the family of a composer friend discovered the autograph manuscript among his belongings, and it was finally published in 1989.