Ryuichi Sakamoto

was a Japanese musician, composer, keyboardist, record producer, singer and actor. He pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of the synth-based band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his YMO bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto influenced and pioneered a number of electronic music genres. and his composition “Energy Flow” (1999) was the first instrumental number-one single in Japan’s Oricon charts history. 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 his original score for 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 French Ministry of Culture in 2009 f