🔎Ryuichi Sakamoto and his 36 Life Fragments🕯️ 

Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away at the age of 71.

In his youth, Sakamoto displayed remarkable talent and won an Academy Award for his achievement in The Last Emperor, becoming a world-renowned music master. He also gained public attention for his role in this Chinese historical film.

In his later years, despite battling cancer, Sakamoto remained devoted to music and pledged to create "music that people will still listen to after 100 years" with childlike innocence.

A retrospective of Sakamoto's life is presented through 36 fragments, showcasing his artistic talent, romanticism, and dignity in the face of illness and death.

1 – Sakamoto was born on January 17, 1952, in Nakano, Tokyo, Japan. At the age of five, he wrote his first composition, "The Song of the Little Rabbit," after being asked by his kindergarten teacher to write a song about taking care of the school's pet rabbit.

2 – His father was a famous editor and his mother was a hat designer, often leaving Sakamoto to take care of himself and leading him to find solace in television.

3 – He was forced to learn the piano by his mother, who invested a significant amount of money in buying him a piano and enrolling him in composition classes. One day, a senior student brought a "Music Life" magazine with the Beatles on the cover to his piano lesson, and Sakamoto became their enthusiastic fan, collecting all their records and watching their films. Despite being too excited to speak in front of his father, he would drag him to the stereo to listen to the Beatles.

4 – After entering junior high school, most of the classmates came from different elementary schools. Ryuichi Sakamoto would ask everyone he met, "Do you know the Beatles?" Those who knew would be considered his good friends, and those who didn't know would be ignored.

5 – Because basketball was popular in school, Ryuichi Sakamoto quickly joined the basketball team. However, training was hurting his hands, which he used to play the piano. His parents and piano teacher were strongly opposed. Faced with the dilemma of "continue studying music or playing basketball," he resolutely chose basketball and stopped attending piano and composition classes.

6 – For nearly half a year, Sakamoto completely abandoned music and devoted himself to playing basketball. However, he felt that something was missing and he realized that he actually loved music. He had to ask his two teachers to let him return to class. Later, he also went to the basketball team captain and said he wanted to quit the team, and was therefore beaten up by the captain in the hallway.

7 - Ryuichi Sakamoto attended Shinjuku High School, a public high school in Tokyo. He wanted to attend this school because the older brother of a female classmate he liked in junior high school wore the school uniform and looked good in it.

8 – In his first year of high school, a senior student confessed her feelings to Ryuichi Sakamoto, but he felt that there was a significant gap between them and did not accept her. As a result, she committed suicide, which had a great impact on him. Ryuichi Sakamoto's first love happened in his second year of high school with an innocent female student, but they only dated for less than a year.

9 – During his senior year of high school, two student protests erupted in Japan. Ryuichi Sakamoto frequented over 30 jazz cafes, chatting with girls about politics and asking their thoughts on events in Vietnam, and then brought them into the protest the next day. The strike lasted for four weeks, and rumors say that Sakamoto was once trapped in his school and played Debussy wearing a helmet. Sakamoto himself claimed not to remember, and if it did happen, it was probably just to show off.

10 – Debussy was one of the musicians who had the greatest influence on Sakamoto. As a child, he even practiced signing his name as Debussy's.

11 – When he arrived at college, he discovered that most of his classmates were the children from wealthy families, exuding an elegant and gorgeous atmosphere. Meanwhile, he stood out with his long hair, jeans, and fierce expression, shouting that he came to school to dismantle the university system.

12 – During his college years, Sakamoto often went to a famous restaurant street in Shinjuku with a group of friends who were into theater to drink. They talked about "liberating music from the control of capitalism" and "emulating China's spirit to use music to serve the workers and peasants."

13 – Sakamoto got married for the first time during his college. He and his wife were both students at the Tokyo University of the Arts. After dating for a while, they had a child and then got married. However, they divorced soon after because of personality differences.

14 – After the divorce, Sakamoto worked at a subway construction site for nine hours a day and earning 4,500 yen. After three days, the foreman told him that the job was not suitable for him and advised him to quit. He then went to various bars to play piano accompaniment and give accompaniment to underground theaters. Until his graduation from graduate school in 1977, Sakamoto remained a "music part-timer" and was 25 years old that year.

15 – In 1978, Ryuichi Sakamoto and his friends Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi formed the renowned avant-garde electronic band YMO. When Hosono suggested forming a band, Sakamoto responded, "My work is busy, and work comes first, but if I have time, I can give it a try."

16 – In the second year of the band's formation, with only two albums released, YMO embarked on a tour of Europe and the United States, becoming nationwide stars upon returning to Japan. Sakamoto was once recognized by a high school student on the street and was so scared that he ran back home. Fame was his biggest problem at the time. YMO announced their dissolution after a performance at the Budokan in late 1983.

17 – In 1982, Sakamoto's idol Nagisa Ôshima invited him to appear in the film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and Sakamoto also took on the job of composing the music.

18 – Before filming "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," Oshima made a promise with Sakamoto that he would not get angry with him, and if he did, Sakamoto could choose not to work. So, when Sakamoto performed poorly during filming, Oshima would scold Takeshi Kitano, "Why did you do that? Sakamoto can't act like this. It's your fault that he can't remember his lines."

19 – In 1983, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival. It was during the festival that Oshima introduced Sakamoto to Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of "The Last Emperor."

20 – In 1986, "The Last Emperor" began filming in China, and there was a scene where Sakamoto played the officer Kanba slashing his stomach. Sakamoto felt that this stereotypical image was embarrassing and directly questioned the director, "Do you want me to slash my stomach or do you want me to leave? If you insist on keeping the scene, I will return to Japan immediately." In the end, the director changed it to a scene where Sakamoto shot himself.

21 – During the filming, when Puyi was "enthroned" in the puppet state of Manchukuo, the director hoped that Sakamoto, as a musician, could provide music for the scene, with only three days to compose and record. Bertolucci teased him with his friend Ennio Morricone, saying that he could write any tune on the spot. Hearing this, Sakamoto didn't refuse. Six months after the film wrapped, while in New York, Sakamoto had just checked out of his hotel room when the front desk called him to ask him to make more music for the film, this time with a one-week deadline...

22 – In 1990, Ryuichi Sakamoto and other Western artists began to collaborate after he moved to New York. In 1993, he appeared in the music video for Madonna's song "Rain," playing the role of a director.

23 – In 2001, he witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and took pictures of the smoking World Trade Center that day. Despite not being interested in photography, he felt a sense of duty to document the event.

24 – His father passed away in 2002 while he was on tour in Europe, and while he expected it, it still made him feel like he had lost a strong support system.

25 – Ryuichi is a staunch environmentalist, and in 2008, he went to Greenland to record the sound of ice breaking and water flowing, which he later used in his 2009 album "Out of Noise." He believes that humans are insignificant compared to nature.

26 – After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Ryuichi held a concert in the evacuation area for the victims and organized a rally with writer Kenzaburô Oe in Tokyo to protest against the rebuilding of nuclear power plants.

27 – In 2014, he was diagnosed with stage III throat cancer, which affected his saliva secretion, causing him to constantly chew gum to stimulate saliva production.

28 – During his treatment, he enjoyed watching Kung Fu movies from Shaw Brothers as they were easy to digest and distracted him from the pain.

29 – In 2015, he recorded the soundtrack for the movie The Revenant at the invitation of Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the final version was nearly two hours long. He once said that, I cannot refuse their request because I admire them so much.

30 – Ryuichi has two wishes: to collaborate with the Coen Brothers and to be a slacker. The former hasn't happened due to style differences, while the latter cannot become the truth due to his working enthusiasm.

31 – In September 2017, the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival in the non-competition section. Director Stephen Nomura Schible had been a fan of Sakamoto since the YMO era and started filming him in 2012. Despite Sakamoto's cancer diagnosis, he encouraged Schible to continue filming, stating that it was a dramatic moment for his films.

32 – Even after becoming ill, Sakamoto, in his 60s, continued to exercise his fingers and play the piano every day. He enjoyed collecting various sounds from daily life and nature, such as the sound of raindrops hitting a plastic bucket on his head or the sound of a patrol car passing by.

33 – Sakamoto's friendship with director Ming-liang Tsai began in 2014 at the Venice Film Festival, where Tsai's film Journey to the West was screened and Sakamoto was the jury president. In 2017, Sakamoto composed music for Tsai's documentary Your Face with 12 songs creating in just a month.

34 – In 2020, Ryuichi Sakamoto was diagnosed with rectal cancer. Over the next two years, he underwent six surgeries, but they were unable to stop the spread of cancer cells in his body. In his autobiography "Music is Freedom," Sakamoto mentioned that he did not want to "die in a place where he couldn't communicate in his mother tongue." Perhaps for this reason, in 2022, he left New York, where he had lived for more than 30 years, and moved back to Japan.

35 – When Hong Kong director Ann Hui was making "The First Scent of Summer," she wanted her idol Ryuichi Sakamoto to appear in the film. She went to Tokyo to meet him, but the professor declined her invitation, saying that he only wanted to be a musician. Hui was disappointed, but after watching the movie, Sakamoto agreed to compose the music for "The First Scent of Summer," marking his first-time composing music for a film in mainland China.

36 – In 2022, Ryuichi Sakamoto published an article in the July issue of the Japanese magazine "Shincho," titled "How Many More Full Moons Can I See?" In it, he wrote, "Sôseki Natsume died of a stomach ulcer at the age of 49. Compared to that, even though I was diagnosed with cancer in 2014 at the age of 62 and have now reached 70, although I don't know how many more full moons I will see in my future life, I consider myself lucky to have survived. I hope to create music until the very end, like my respected Bach and Debussy."

On March 28, 2023, our beloved composer Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away from cancer. The quality of one's life is more important than its length, and I believe he lived a valuable life. Mr. Sakamoto will be forever remembered.