He had composed the soundtracks of Furyo, The Last Emperor… The Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, pioneer of electronic music and author of many film scores, died on March 28 at the age of 71 from cancer, announced his team on its official website, Sunday, April 2. Sakamoto had revealed, at the beginning of 2021, to suffer from colorectal cancer, after having been treated for throat cancer since 2014.

An erudite and refined composer, whose subtle writing cultivates a minimalism of powerful emotional density, “he lived with the music until the very end”, added his team in a press release, explaining that the artist had wished discreet funeral reserved for his family circle.

The general international public discovered him with his film scores, starting with that of Furyo, by Nagisa Oshima (1983), a subversive film about a prison camp in Asia during the Second World War, where Ryuichi Sakamoto also shines as as an actor alongside David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano.

In 1988, he won the Oscar for best film music for having co-written that of The Last Emperor, by Bernardo Bertolucci, who collaborated with him several times, notably on his next film, Un thé au Sahara (1990).

Ryuichi Sakamoto had also worked for Brian De Palma and Pedro Almodovar, and more recently wrote the soundtrack for The Revenant, by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (2015).

Madly in love with the music of Debussy

Born in Tokyo on January 17, 1952, he grew up immersed in culture and the arts, his father being a publisher of Japanese novelists, including the immense Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima.

He discovers the piano very young. As a teenager, the rock of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones fascinated him just as much as Bach and Haydn, before falling madly in love with Debussy.

While studying ethnomusicology and composition, earning him the respectful nickname of “Professor” in Japan, he began to perform on stage in the bustling Tokyo of the 1970s.

“I worked with the computer in college and played jazz, bought psychedelic West Coast music and early Kraftwerk records in the afternoons, and at night I played folk. I was pretty busy! “, he told in 2018 to the british daily The Guardian.

In 1978, he co-founded with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi the group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), whose supercharged electro-pop would later have a huge influence on techno, hip-hop and J-pop, and inspire the synthesized melodies of the first video games.

YMO’s success will be phenomenal in Japan and some of its hits will also be noticed in the West, such as the electro-funk Computer Game/Firecracker, which will be sampled by American hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, or Behind the Mask, which will result in covers by Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton.

Experimenter

After the dissolution of YMO at the end of 1983, Ryuichi Sakamoto gave free rein to his solo projects, exploring a host of musical styles throughout his career (progressive and ambient rock, rap, house, contemporary music, bossa-nova, etc.).

He multiplies collaborations with avant-garde artists, but also with stars like the punk Iggy Pop, the Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora, the Brazilian Caetano Veloso or the Senegalese Youssou N’Dour. “I want to be a citizen of the world. It may sound very hippie but I like it,” said Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has lived in New York since the 1990s.

Far from being an artist in his ivory tower, Ryuichi Sakamoto was also very sensitive to major societal issues. A long-time environmental activist, he became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement in Japan after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011.

As such, he notably organized in 2012 a mega-concert against nuclear power near Tokyo, inviting, not without irony, his friends from Kraftwerk (which means “power station” in German), one of whose titles -headlights is Radioactivity.

In 2007, he also founded More Trees, an NGO for sustainable forest management in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia. Married and divorced twice, Ryuichi Sakamoto was notably the father of J-pop singer Miu Sakamoto, born in 1980 from his union with Japanese singer and pianist Akiko Yano.