"He lived with music until the very end," his team said in a statement posted on its official website, adding that the artist had wanted a discreet funeral reserved for his family circle.

Sakamoto revealed in early 2021 that he had colorectal cancer, after being 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 co-writing "The Last Emperor" by Bernardo Bertolucci, who collaborated with him several times, notably on his next film, "A Tea in the Sahara" (1990).

Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, in Paris on October 19, 2016 © NICOLAS MAETERLINCK / Belga/AFP/Archives

Ryuichi Sakamoto had also worked for Brian de Palma and Pedro Almodovar, and most 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 great Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima.

He discovered the piano at a very young age. 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, which earned him the respectful nickname "teacher" in Japan, he began performing on stage in the bubbling Tokyo of the 1970s.

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

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 inspired the synthesized melodies of the first video games.

The success of YMO 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 the American pioneer of hip hop Afrika Bambaataa, or "Behind the Mask", which will give rise to covers by Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton.

Fervent anti-nuclear

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

He multiplies collaborations with avant-garde artists, but also with stars such as punk Iggy Pop, Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora, Brazilian Caetano Veloso or Senegalese Youssou N'Dour.

Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto poses on June 30, 2016 in Paris © JOEL SAGET / AFP

"I want to be a citizen of the world. It may sound very hippie but I like it," said Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had 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 Japan's anti-nuclear movement after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011.

As such, he had organized in 2012 a mega-concert against nuclear power near Tokyo, inviting not without irony his friends from Kraftwerk (which means power plant in German), and one of whose flagship titles is called "Radioactivity".

Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, pioneer of electronic music and author of many film scores, October 22, 2005 in Rome © TIZIANA FABI / AFP/Archives

He also founded More Trees, a sustainable forest management NGO in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia, in 2007.

Married and divorced twice, Ryuichi Sakamoto was the father of J-pop singer Miu Sakamoto, born in 1980 from his union with Japanese singer and pianist Akiko Yano.

© 2023 AFP