Ryuichi Sakamoto

Random and bite-sized facts on all things from the mythical figure that was Ryuichi Sakamoto. Totally random but totally fascinating if you're into it. Do you know Ryuichi Sakamoto now?

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto became a genuine, outspoken anti-nuclear activist after the 2011 Fukushima disaster — helping organise the 2012 "No Nukes" benefit concert in Chiba, where his own Yellow Magic Orchestra shared the bill with Kraftwerk. He also led the Tohoku Youth Orchestra, formed from children affected by the earthquake and tsunami, composing a new symphony for them. ☢️🎹

Ryuichi Sakamoto
When Sakamoto died in March 2023 after a long battle with cancer, his official statement closed with the Latin phrase he loved most: "Ars longa, vita brevis" — art is long, life is short. He continued composing right until the end, releasing his final album, 12, mere months before his death. 🎹🕊️

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto became the first Asian composer ever to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score, for 1987's The Last Emperor — shared with David Byrne of Talking Heads and composer Cong Su. Despite the Oscar, Sakamoto later admitted he felt the finished score lacked "flow" and was crudely integrated into the film. 🏆🎹

Ryuichi Sakamoto
As a high school student in the late 1960s, Sakamoto took part in Japan's student protest movement, helping shut down his own school for several weeks. He later described his politics at the time as "not a 100 percent Marxist, but kind of," and said the experience "was at the core of who I am." ✊🎹

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto called Claude Debussy his musical hero, once explaining: "Asian music heavily influenced Debussy, and Debussy heavily influenced me. So, the music goes around the world and comes full circle." His 1980 solo track "Riot in Lagos" would later prove genuinely significant in the early development of electro and hip hop. 🎹🌍

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto married singer Akiko Yano in 1982 after several musical collaborations, including her touring work with Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their marriage ended in 2006, though the two had already lived separately for 14 years by mutual agreement beforehand — their daughter, Miu Sakamoto, became a J-pop singer in her own right. 🎹💍

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto encountered a piano that had survived the 2011 Japanese tsunami — waterlogged, warped, wildly out of tune. Rather than seeing it as damaged, he described it as having been "retuned by nature," and sampled its unusual, distorted sound directly into his later compositions. "I felt as if I was playing the corpse of a piano that drowned," he said. 🌊🎹

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto's final album, 12, released on his 71st birthday just two months before his death, began purely as personal recovery: "I had no intention of composing something; I just wanted to be showered in sound." Each track is titled by the exact date it was recorded, forming a genuine sound diary through his final cancer treatment — including audible traces of his own breathing left in the final mix. 🎹🕊️

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto's 2017 album async was conceived as the score to an imaginary film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky — one that never existed. On the track "Life, Life," David Sylvian reads a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky, the director's own father, over a composition built from a sho and plucked strings. Author Paul Bowles also appears, speaking on death and memory, recorded years earlier for Sakamoto's The Sheltering Sky score. 🎬🎹

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto's 1978 solo debut, Thousand Knives, released just before Yellow Magic Orchestra even formed, was among the earliest records ever to use the microprocessor-based Roland MC-8 sequencer — the same instrument that would later define YMO's entire sound. Hosono himself contributed to its title track. 🎹💾

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto's 1987 album Neo Geo boasts a genuinely staggering cast — jazz drummer Tony Williams, reggae legend Sly Dunbar, funk icon Bootsy Collins, and, most surprisingly, Iggy Pop delivering his own spoken vocals. Two years later, Beauty went even further, somehow bringing Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys into the fold. 🎸🎹

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Madonna initially approached Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini to play the fictional director in her 1993 "Rain" music video — Sakamoto ultimately won the role instead, cast for his iconic status in Japan. Director Mark Romanek deliberately built the video around a Japanese film crew to make Madonna appear more vulnerable and "out of place." 🎬🎹

Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sakamoto's entire acting career began by accident — a striking 1981 photo book of him led directly to his casting as a Japanese POW camp commander alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, his first-ever film role. 📷🎬

Ryuichi Sakamoto
In 2013, Sakamoto reunited with his The Last Emperor Oscar co-composer David Byrne to re-record "Psychedelic Afternoon" with new lyrics — released specifically to raise money for children who survived the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. 🎹💙

Ryuichi Sakamoto
In 1994, Sakamoto composed a soundtrack for a Yohji Yamamoto runway show — placing him among a small, elite group of musicians ever asked to score a fashion presentation, alongside later names like Beck (Dior Homme) and SOPHIE (Louis Vuitton). Sakamoto himself said his own dream commission would have been for designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. 👗🎹

David Sylvian & Ryuichi Sakamoto
Recording "Bamboo Music" in 1982, Sylvian deliberately withheld a song he'd already written from Sakamoto, hoping instead for something "purely collaborative" — Sakamoto had only a brief window between a London project and his flight home to Japan. Sylvian later reflected: "He had all that knowledge of music, thanks to his classical training. From there our friendship has grown." Decades later, Sakamoto kept returning to the same intertwining melody in his solo piano performances, right up until his death. 🎹🎋

David Sylvian & Ryuichi Sakamoto
Their collaboration spanned four decades, from 1980's Gentlemen Take Polaroids — some Japan members felt "Taking Islands in Africa" was really a Sylvian/Sakamoto creation rather than a true band effort — through 1983's "Forbidden Colours," 1992's "Heartbeat," and 2003's "World Citizen," created as part of Sakamoto's own "Chain Music" project. Sylvian released the latter on his own label, Samadhi Sound, alongside albums by Harold Budd and his and his brother's Steve Jansen's project Nine Horses. 🎹⛓️

Ryuichi Sakamoto & Robin Scott

One of Ryuichi Sakamoto's strangest early-1980s collaborations came through an unlikely connection: Robin Scott, the British musician behind M's enormous 1979 hit "Pop Muzik".

Sakamoto had heard Scott's album Official Secrets and was sufficiently interested to invite him to Tokyo to help produce his next solo album, Left Handed Dream. Scott accepted and spent several weeks working with Sakamoto in Japan.

There was an unusual practical problem. Sakamoto did not speak English at the time, so the two musicians worked through a translator. Scott later recalled the experience as fascinating, with Sakamoto particularly interested in using Western musicians and ideas to explore cultural differences in music.

The sessions took place at Alfa Studio in Tokyo in July 1981. The musicians around Sakamoto included his Yellow Magic Orchestra colleagues Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, keyboard programmer Hideki Matsutake and guitarist Adrian Belew.

Scott wasn't simply brought in as a producer. He contributed vocals and co-wrote several pieces, creating an unusual meeting point between Sakamoto's experimental electronic music and Scott's very different pop sensibility.

One of the most intriguing results was "The Left Bank", which combined Sakamoto's electronic music with Scott's English-language vocal. The track later appeared alongside other Scott collaborations on The Arrangement.

The Arrangement was released in 1982 and gathered material from the Sakamoto-Scott sessions into a more overtly song-oriented collection. It sounds considerably closer to sophisticated early-1980s synth-pop than some of Sakamoto's more experimental solo work.

It's an extraordinary chain of connections: the man responsible for one of the most recognisable pop singles of 1979 travelled to Tokyo and found himself working with one of Japan's most adventurous electronic musicians — alongside members of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Adrian Belew.

Scott later described Sakamoto as someone who was particularly interested in collaboration with Western musicians and in exploring different musical cultures. Their brief partnership produced some of the most unusual pop experiments in Sakamoto's early solo career.

David Sylvian & Ryuichi Sakamoto — Forbidden Colours

When Ryuichi Sakamoto sent David Sylvian a tape of the music he had written for Nagisa Oshima's film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, he asked Sylvian to write lyrics for it. Sylvian later described the music as beautiful and extraordinary, particularly its use of sound and sampling.

The recording became "Forbidden Colours", released in 1983 as a Sylvian/Sakamoto single and using Sakamoto's existing film composition as its musical foundation.

Sylvian didn't simply write a conventional vocal melody over Sakamoto's music. He discovered that Sakamoto had already written such a strong melody that trying to follow it didn't work. Instead, Sylvian created a counter-melody of his own that could sit against Sakamoto's original.

There was a practical problem when Sylvian arrived in Tokyo to record the vocal. He had an awful cold and could barely sing. The vocal was nevertheless completed in a single afternoon at Onkio Haus, with Seigen Ono assisting.

Sylvian later said that being given "Forbidden Colours" helped open the door to his solo career. After Japan had broken up, he had struggled to begin writing again; working on Sakamoto's composition suddenly got the creative process moving.

The song became one of the most important bridges between Sylvian's work with Japan and the very different musical world of his first solo album, Brilliant Trees.

The result is remarkable: Sakamoto's cinematic composition was transformed into something intensely personal by Sylvian's voice and lyrics, while still retaining the strange, ambiguous atmosphere of the original film music.

David Sylvian & Ryuichi Sakamoto — Bamboo Houses

Before "Forbidden Colours", David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto had already made one of their most intriguing collaborations: "Bamboo Houses", released in 1982 with "Bamboo Music" on the other side.

"Bamboo Houses" was actually primarily Sylvian's piece. He later explained that he wrote the main chord sequence, primary synthesizer melody, middle section and bass.

Sakamoto added the counter-melodies heard at the opening, along with sequenced drums and marimba. The arrangement therefore became a genuine meeting of their two musical approaches rather than simply a guest appearance.

Sylvian also asked Sakamoto to speak on the track. But the recording was interrupted when Sakamoto had to leave before the piece was finished, leaving Sylvian with a much greater role in completing its musical development.

The single was produced by Sylvian, Sakamoto and engineer Steve Nye, and released by Virgin in July 1982.

It came at a fascinating point in Sylvian's career: Japan were still completing their final commitments, while Sylvian was already beginning to explore the more experimental territory that would become central to his solo work.

The track is particularly interesting because Sylvian later remembered it as his piece with Sakamoto's distinctive electronic touches woven into it — a collaboration in which the balance between the two musicians was unusually fluid.

David Sylvian & Ryuichi Sakamoto — Heartbeat

Almost a decade after their first collaborations, David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto returned to working together on "Heartbeat (Tainai Kaiki II)" in 1992.

The track was Sylvian's reinvention of Sakamoto's earlier composition "Tainai Kaiki". Rather than simply revisiting the original, Sylvian reshaped it into something much more spacious and song-like.

The recording also brought in American poet and musician Ingrid Chavez, whose spoken-word contribution became one of the defining elements of the piece.

The collaboration developed into something much larger than a conventional pop single. Sylvian, Sakamoto and Chavez created a piece concerned with birth, life and the continuity between generations, giving "Heartbeat" an unusually intimate atmosphere.

Bill Frisell also appears on the recording. His guitar contribution has an especially unusual story: Sylvian later revealed that Frisell's solo was taken from a single performance.

The single appeared in 1992, with several related versions and releases. The distinctive blue Heartbeat box set included "Heartbeat (Tainai Kaiki II)", "Forbidden Colours", "Heartbeat I" and "Nuages".

By this point the Sylvian/Sakamoto relationship had evolved far beyond their early-1980s collaborations. What began with electronic experimentation and film music had developed into a much more atmospheric meeting of electronic music, spoken word and improvisation.