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Remembering Ryūichi Sakamoto (1952-2023)

Who was Ryūichi Sakamoto?
Ryuichi Sakamoto (坂本 龍一 January 17, 1952 – March 28, 2023) was a Japanese composer, pianist, record producer, and actor who pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto influenced and pioneered a number of electronic music genres.

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Sakamoto began his career as a session musician, producer, and arranger, while he was at university in the 1970s. His first major success came in 1978 as co-founder of YMO. He pursued a solo career at the same time, releasing the experimental electronic fusion album Thousand Knives in 1978, and the album B-2 Unit in 1980. B-2 Unit included the track “Riot in Lagos”, which was a significant contribution to the development of electro and hip hop music.
He went on to produce more solo records, and collaborate with many international artists, David Sylvian, DJ Spooky, Carsten Nicolai, Youssou N’Dour, and Fennesz among them. Sakamoto composed music for the opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and his composition “Energy Flow” (1999) was the first instrumental number-one single in Japan’s Oricon charts history.
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As a film score composer, Sakamoto won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy, and two Golden Globe Awards. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) marked his debut as both an actor and a film-score composer; its main theme was adapted into the single “Forbidden Colours” which became an international hit.
His most successful work as a film composer was The Last Emperor (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, making him the first Japanese composer to win an Academy Award. He continued earning accolades composing for films such as The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993), and The Revenant (2015). On occasion, Sakamoto also worked as a composer and a scenario writer on anime and video games. He was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Ministry of Culture of France in 2009 for his contributions to music.
Ryūichi Sakamoto: an ode to life
The Japanese musician died in March 2023 due to cancer, an illness that he experienced, unfortunately, twice. Through his latest albums, ‘Async’ and ’12’, he tenaciously demonstrated his passion for life in the face of adversity, without struggle and without epic.
The Japanese pianist Ryūichi Sakamoto suffered from cancer twice. In 2014, oropharyngeal cancer. In 2021, colorectal. Despite the uncertainty, or perhaps in the face of it, Sakamoto continued composing and playing. 12 was his last album released during his lifetime. Because precisely his story has to do with life, the passion for music and the desire not to succumb to illness.
Sakamoto had a multitude of faces: as an actor, as an activist, as a producer. But the one who shined the most of all was as a singer and composer. From the beginning, he was a pioneer of keyboard music in the band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Later, alone, he developed his career through electro music, fusion with Japanese tradition and multi-genre creations , such as the peculiar opera Life . In 1987 he had already achieved worldwide fame when he received the Oscar award for best soundtrack with The Last Emperor , by Bernardo Bertolucci.
At the turn of the millennium, the artist was a celebrity inspiration for numerous musical subgenres, such as ambient house and electropop. He recorded numerous albums and continued composing soundtracks for many films. He also dedicated efforts to his anti-nuclear activism through the organization Stop Rokkasho.
But life wouldn’t be life without its setbacks. In 2014, at age 62, Sakamoto was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer. In other words, cancer in the larynx. “After reflecting,” he reported to the pianist, “I have decided to take a break to treat myself.” The decision forced him to cancel the numerous performances he had planned. Three years later, a documentary about him was released, Ryūichi Sakamoto: Coda , by director Stephen Nomura Schible, where the musician explained his process of accepting the disease: “It doesn’t [change your life] that much. It just showed me more clearly and realistically that my life time is limited and that I must focus on what I want and what I need. With cancer you question what you want to do with your life. During the treatment of this first cancer condition, Sakamoto participated in the documentary assuming that, probably, those years would be the last of his existence. However, he continued to compose to the extent that his strength and spirit allowed him.
Async , released at the Big Ears Festival in March 2017, was a declaration of love for the author’s life , where he continued to merge ambient house with Japanese tradition. Sakamoto wanted to offer a moment of asynchrony with society and subjected his rhythms to an accelerated technologization that the pianist judiciously and openly criticized.
The arduous process of the disease gave way to a faint hope. Although the laryngeal cancer was eradicated, he was soon diagnosed with colorectal cancer. On this occasion, fate offered him the other side of the coin, passing away in 2023, at 71 years of age.
’12’, the serene farewell
Grave, with the disease dominating his body, Ryūichi Sakamoto held the immaterial dimension of the human condition as the antithesis of the fragility of matter. In just thirteen months he composed 12 , an album that he dedicated as a farewell . The work includes twelve minimalist, sober, light elegies, with evident echoes of some great composers, whom the artist recognized as his teachers: in the compositions there are touches of inspiration in Debussy and Chopin , in a tone between melancholic and lively, where the listener is invited to a renewed internalization.
Beyond the context in which the melodies were created, 12 offers a feeling of bittersweet encounter with the pianist. The elegiac tone has a marked background: life, above all life, always makes its way . Mortality seems to dictate an aphorism that is repeated in each composition on the album. Fragility, embraced, becomes strength. Mortality, apparent fragility, is just a veil. Whatever the state after the final moment – nothingness, everything, another existence, statism, eternal existence or an undesirable disappearance – life is explained by the process of dying. Sakamoto had been preparing to surrender to this hasty outcome. He did not want to say goodbye paralyzed by the illness, but rather embracing existence in its fullness.
There is no valid or universal moral, nor admissible example to follow, that can be extracted from the life experience that Sakamoto had to endure, as there is none from any person who has survived or is facing a serious and fatal illness. Sakamoto offered a sensitive, human and infinitely rational view: death is the final stop on the journey of every human being, but it is the act of living that offers us a renewed opportunity every day, every hour, every second. Become a serene movement, an unstoppable verb: exist, be, feel. Be. Love.
Why everyone should know the work of the recently deceased Ryuichi Sakamoto
Ryuichi Sakamoto died on March 28 at the age of 71. In 2021, he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer for which he was receiving treatment, according to the obituary dedicated to him by The New York Times . However, his death did not become known until April 2, when his personal Instagram and Twitter accounts confirmed the news. The Japanese composer, who was behind the memorable soundtracks of films such as Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence or The Last Emperor – work that earned him an Oscar in 1987 – began his musical career by learning to play the piano in preschool, in love with composers. Europeans like JS Bach or Claude Debussy . At the age of 11, he began to embrace the avant-garde of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, and when he entered the National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo in 1970, he was already exploring the dizzying possibilities offered by synthesizers such as Buchla and Moog.
Member and founder in 1978 of the Tokyo electronic music trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) , along with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi , he managed to combine electropop with elegant graphics and costume design. Sakamoto himself expressed himself forcefully about this in an interview in 1988: “We invented technopop ” . This musical trio managed to bring ingenuity and warmth to the use of electronic music, which contrasted with the studied academic correctness of the Europeans.
Ryuichi Sakamoto began his solo career years before YMO split in 1984. His experimental sounds, his aptitude for electronic music and an ear for countless musical styles made him one of the most influential musicians of the late 20th century. In 1980 he published his second independent album, B-2 Unit , considered his best work. Still sounding futuristic to this day, it has been described as a jungle of synthetic sounds. Topics like Participation Mystique transported and surprised the listener of the time, with structured, elegant and sometimes even indecipherable musical tones.
It was a year before the Japanese trio split up when Sakamoto decided to debut in the soundtrack genre. Films such as Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, by Nagisa Oshima , in which he also co-starred with the artist David Bowie , ‘s film or Bernardo Bertolucci The Last Emperor, allowed him to conquer the international scene and win the BAFTA in 1983 and the aforementioned Academy Award. in 1987, respectively.
It was in 1991 when the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar wanted the Japanese musician to be in charge of the soundtrack for his film Tacones Lejanos , starring Marisa Paredes, Miguel Bosé and Victoria Abril . Among his latest works, the one he made with Alejandro González Iñárritu in his 2015 feature film The Revenant , starring Leonardo DiCaprio , stood out .
Born a musical prodigy, as well as becoming a composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto was a committed political and environmental activist, who used his platform to raise awareness about issues such as nuclear energy and climate change. Developing new ways of creating and experimenting with sound and music from emotion, he became a versatile and multifaceted artist, who has left an indelible mark on contemporary music and popular culture, both Eastern and Western.