He composed unforgettable film music, tirelessly pioneered digital sounds and campaigned fervently for the environment: the abundant artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, adored in his native Japan, died of cancer on March 28 at the age of 71.
“He lived with the music until the very end,” his team said in a statement posted on his official website, adding that the artist had wanted a low-key funeral reserved for his family circle.
Sakamoto had revealed in early 2021 to suffer from colorectal cancer, after having been treated for throat cancer since 2014.
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 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, A tea in the Sahara (1990).
Ryuichi Sakamoto had also worked for Brian de Palma and Pedro Almodóvar, and more recently wrote the soundtrack for The Revenant, by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2015).
The teacher “
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, then he fell madly in love with Debussy.
While studying ethnomusicology and composition, which earned him the respectful nickname of “professor” in Japan, he began to perform on stage in the bubbling 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 quite 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 from early video games.
YMO’s success will be phenomenal in Japan, and some of its hits will also be noticed in the West, such as electro-funk Computer Game/Firecracker, which will be sampled by American hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, or Behind the Mask, which will give rise to covers by Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton.
fervent antinuclear
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, in 2012 he notably organized a mega-concert against nuclear power near Tokyo, ironically inviting his friends from Kraftwerk (which means power plant in German), one of the flagship titles of which is called 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.