Former Japanese pop heart-throb and musical pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto talks about music, the state of the planet — and why he still reluctantly lives in New York City.
What a long, strange journey it has been for Ryuichi Sakamoto. A revolutionary firebrand in the 1960s, he morphed into a '70s techno-pop pioneer with the seminal band Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he co-founded with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi. YMO became one of Japan's biggest-selling bands ever -- and even posted a late-'70s Top 20 hit in Britain with "Firecracker." The band was also a key influence on the techno and house movements that swept Western pop culture a decade later.
After a brief stint as a movie star in the early 1980s, including his role in Nagisa Oshima's 1983 standout "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" -- for which he also wrote the soundtrack -- Sakamoto co-wrote (with Talking Heads' singer David Byrne and Cong Su) the 1987 Oscar-winning soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" -- still the best known of the many soundtracks he has written -- of which 2002's "Femme Fatale" is among his latest.
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