Published in Nikkei Asia 08/04/2023
Ryuichi Sakamoto, who passed away last week, was the best known and most successful Japanese musician in the world. He won an Oscar for his soundtrack to Bernard Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” and several Golden Globes and Grammy awards and nominations for other films. In 1992, he scored the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics, conducting the orchestra while a billion people watched.
His song “Behind the Mask” has been recorded by Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton. In Beijing, the foreign ministry spokesman said that China was “deeply saddened” by his death. In France, he was taken very seriously, being considered an heir to Eric Satie and Claude Debussy, in the words of the French newspaper Libération.
That’s not such stretch as it might seem at first sight. He studied both composers intensively at Tokyo University of the Arts. And just as Debussy was entranced by the gamelan music he heard at the World Expo of 1889, so Sakamoto was bowled over by a gamelan troupe who came to Japan in the 1970s. The influence is there in many of his compositions, most notably the most famous of all, the theme from the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”.
Despite his many accomplishments, Sakamoto seems to have remained a grounded human being, dropping into neighbourhood music bars from time to time and guesting on popular TV comedy shows. Like many Japanese artists, he had no objection to appearing in TV commercials and featured in dozens of ads for companies such as Nissan, Toyota and beer maker Sapporo.
Nonetheless, he never gave up the anti-capitalist political views that he acquired from the student movement of his youth. Indeed, one of his last actions was to send a letter to the mayor of Tokyo protesting the controversial plan to build a huge office and shopping mall complex in the leafy central district of Jingu.
I, probably like many others, formed my mental image of Sakamoto from his role in “Mr Lawrence”. The 1983 film is far from director Nagisa Oshima’s best work, but the powerful scenes depicting the fatal attraction between the commander of the prison of war camp, played by Sakamoto, and a British prisoner, played by David Bowie, stick in the mind.
As camp commander
Sakamoto was not comfortable acting and did little of it subsequently, but his charisma was palpable. Apparently, he modelled his part on another famous performer, novelist Yukio Mishima who had committed ritual suicide at a military base in 1970. Sakamoto’s father was a literary editor who had professional dealings with Mishima. Appropriately, Sakamoto titled the film’s unforgettable theme “Forbidden Colours” after the Mishima book of the same name.
At the time, Sakamoto was already famous as the keyboard player in YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra), a futuristic electropop trio that also featured bassist Haruomi Hosono, an equally bold explorer of offbeat musical pathways, and drummer and main vocalist Yukihiro Takahashi.
To an extent that no other Japanese band has managed before or since, YMO became an international phenomenon. “Solid State Survivor”, their second album, sold over two million copies. The standout track was their eerie synthesizer-driven take on The Beatles’ “Day Tripper” which they made sound like the lament of an android.
YMO were tapping into a cyber-punk vibe that took in the SF novels of William Gibson, the film “Blade Runner”, primitive video games and the musical experiments of synth pioneer Isao Tomita and American minimalist Terry Riley. In stark contrast to the dominant genres of rock and punk, the music was unemotional and precise. Foreshadowing the hyper-connected, A.I. controlled world we are entering forty years later, it was music for computer nerds at a time when nobody owned a computer.
Yet musically there was more than that to YMO. On their American tour, they appeared on the legendary black music TV show, Soul Train, playing their own version of “Tighten Up”, a funk classic by Archie Bell and the Drells. It is hard to envisage other electronic music pioneers such as the German band Kraftwerk getting the audience boogying on the dance floor, but Sakamoto had a populist edge to him, as well as a sense of humour. Listening to the jazz-funk of Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters band had revolutionized his thinking about music, alerting him to the importance of the groove.
YMO didn’t stay around for long, but they helped to pave the way for genres such as techno, hip hop and house music, with Sakamoto’s instrumental “Riot in Lagos” being particularly influential. The key to their sound was the battery of electronic equipment they used – samplers, sequencers, programmable drum machines, synthesizers, vocoders etc. The artificiality was the whole point.
Not all these gizmos were made in Japan, but very many did come off the production lines of Yamaha, Roland and Korg and were powered by semiconductors made by Toshiba and Hitachi. The 1980s were a time when the future really did look Japanese. Not for nothing was William Gibson’s breakthrough novel set in Chiba City and “Blade Runner” in a Japanized version of Los Angeles.
In retrospect, it is ironic that in his later years Sakamoto mourned the loss of sonic diversity in Tokyo as the buzz of cicadas and the chirping of frogs disappeared from the suburbs. The bleeps and blurps that have replaced them are not much different from the sounds emanating from YMO’s electronic instruments.
Sakamoto’s nickname was “Kyoju” (“Professor”), given to him by YMO drummer Takahashi because he was pursuing a higher degree when they first met. It stuck due to his somewhat academic looks and demeanour, but he was certainly impressively knowledgeable about many different kinds of music.
As an adolescent, his heroes were Stravinsky, Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt and The Beatles. At Tokyo University of the Arts, he studied under Toshiro Mayuzumi, one of Japan’s leading post-war composers, producing sonatas and chamber pieces in the style of Bartok and Webern as well as familiarizing himself with various ethnic musics such as Okinawan folk songs.
With such a background, it was inevitable that his own music would be highly eclectic, and so it proved. Sakamoto was such a prolific musician – and author, for that matter – that it is hard to sift through his oeuvre.
Personally, I prefer the spare, piano-based pieces of his later years to the electropop on which he made his name. A particular favourite is “Casa”, an album of songs by the great Bossa Nova composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, recorded in Jobim’s house and using his piano.
The performers are Sakamoto, Jacques Morelenbaum on cello and Paula Morelenbaum on vocals. Two similar albums followed, almost as good.
The avant garde side of Sakamoto came to the fore with “the tsunami piano”, an instrument that was waterlogged and badly bashed around when a terrifying tsunami hit the north east coast of Japan in March 2011. Sakamoto rescued it and patched it up. Playing it, he said, was like playing the corpse of a piano. But the irregular sounds it made were simply “nature’s tuning”, a concept that matched the abstract John Cage-like turn that his music was taking. Sounds from the tsunami piano featured on the track “Zure” from his 2017 album “async”, which is one of his most interesting and challenging recordings.
There won’t be any more like that. Sakamoto has gone and with him goes some rare creativity, but he leaves behind a plentiful legacy for his fans to explore.