Ryuichi Sakamoto, eclectic composer who saw no borders, dies at 71

Mr. Sakamoto founded the Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, inspired by the German electronica group Kraftwerk, and it soon emerged as Japan’s top-selling band.

Popularly known as YMO, the orchestra perfected a witty robotic pop that attracted legions of teenage fans in Japan and influenced the sound of everything from Nintendo video game scores to the techno genre and hip-hop.

YMO had dance-floor hits in the United States with the funky synth tracks “Firecracker” and “Tighten Up,” which toyed with ancient Eastern musical sounds and new technology. They earned a spot on “Soul Train” in 1980, where they played “Tighten Up” and their popular song “Computer Game.”

Fans included Duran Duran and producer Todd Rundgren, and their song “Behind the Mask” was covered by Eric Clapton and Michael Jackson. “We were very big,” Mr. Sakamoto told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2008. “That’s why I hated it. We were always followed by paparazzi.”

The band broke up in 1983, and Mr. Sakamoto became a prolific solo artist with forays into acting.

He played a Japanese prison guard opposite another musician, David Bowie, in the World War II drama “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983). Mr. Sakamoto agreed to take the role only if he could score the movie as well, and he composed a stutter-step main theme that combined an Eastern pentatonic scale with French impressionism for a strikingly catchy result.

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“I tried to make a Christmas song, because it’s a Christmas film,” he explained to the London Daily Telegraph in 2017. “But it’s also a fantasy story — a meeting of Western and Eastern gods — so I wanted it to sound exotic to both Western and Eastern ears.”

The score, which featured synthesizers anachronistic for the film’s historical setting, earned Mr. Sakamoto an award for best movie score from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci hired Mr. Sakamoto to co-score the 1987 epic “The Last Emperor” alongside David Byrne of Talking Heads and the Chinese composer Cong Su. Mr. Sakamoto’s main theme was a 70-millimeter sized melody full of romance and nostalgia.

The composers shared an Academy Award and a Grammy Award for their soundtrack score. The film, in which Mr. Sakamoto played a Japanese officer and ally of the emperor, also collected the best picture Oscar.

Mr. Sakamoto reunited with Bertolucci on “The Sheltering Sky” (1990), starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger as a couple traveling in North Africa amid marital ennui, and again on “Little Buddha” (1993). Madonna cast him as a director in a music video within a music video for her 1993 song “Rain.”

But Mr. Sakamoto was far more comfortable behind the screen. He scored approximately 50 feature films, documentaries and television projects — including “Wuthering Heights” (1992) starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, the 1993 miniseries “Wild Palms,” produced by Oliver Stone, and “Snake Eyes” (1998) and “Femme Fatale” (2002) for director Brian De Palma.

In 2015, filmmaker Alejandro Iñárrito asked Mr. Sakamoto to write music for his survivalist film “The Revenant,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a frontiersman staving off vicious bears and the elements in the early 19th century.

Working with the German musician Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto used cold synthesizers and layers of sound and approximated slow, heavy breaths for this story about a man’s return from near death.

Shortly before taking the assignment, Mr. Sakamoto said he had recovered from throat cancer and said the sounds he created for “The Revenant” were influenced by what he called “the closest moment to death in my life.”

Ryuichi Sakamoto was born in Tokyo on Jan. 17, 1952. His father was a prominent editor who worked on books by Yukio Mishima and Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.

“I remember our house was always full of writers, poets and creative people who were sort of outcasts in Japanese society, sitting around talking and drinking all night,” Mr. Sakamoto told the Times of London. “I was very conscious of being different from other people; it felt natural to be different.”

His mother designed women’s hats and played the piano, exposing him to classical music from infancy. Mr. Sakamoto started playing piano when he was 3, and was writing music at 10. He grew up on a steady diet of Western culture, from TV westerns to the Beatles, but he also gravitated toward the daring work of composer John Cage and French New Wave films.

“They destroyed classical rules and concepts,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “I was taking more traditional European composing and piano classes, and they had all these rules, foreign rules. People like Cage let music and art be free.”

During high school in the 1960s, he attended anti-Vietnam demonstrations and jazz clubs, forming a band with his friends to play bossa nova and Miles Davis music.

In the mid-1970s, at what is now Tokyo University of the Arts, he received a master’s degree in music composition but also became intensely devoted to the study of electronic and ethnic music.

For his many solo albums, Mr. Sakamoto used the term “Neo Geo” to describe a musical melting pot with no geographical borders.

“I have a cultural map in my head,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 2002, “where I find similarities between different cultures. For example, domestic Japanese pop music sounds like Arabic music to me — the vocal intonations and vibrato — and, in my mind, Bali is next to New York. Maybe everyone has these geographies in their head. This is the way I’ve been working.”

On the 1989 album “Beauty,” he played in a nine-piece band with musicians from England, the United States, Brazil and Japan. In 1997 he released “Discord,” a work in four movements that combined a 70-piece orchestra, a DJ and text narrated by Bertolucci, Byrne and Patti Smith, that Mr. Sakamoto wrote based on his conversations with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the Dalai Lama about salvation.

In 2001, Mr. Sakamoto recorded an entire album of bossa nova — “Casa” — that was recorded in Rio de Janeiro at the home of the late Antonio Carlos Jobim, using the same piano on which Jobin wrote “The Girl From Ipanema.”

He became increasingly concerned about the environment, especially after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. He recorded music on a waterlogged piano in a school destroyed by the resulting tsunami and incorporated those and other sounds harvested from forests and oceans into the 2017 album “async.”

Mr. Sakamoto, who had lived in New York City since 1990, was married several times, including to pop singer Akiko Yano. Survivors include his wife Norika Sora, who was also his manager; and several children, including singer Miu Sakamoto from his marriage to Yano. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

At any given moment, Mr. Sakamoto might be writing an opera, collaborating with such artists as Brian Wilson or Iggy Pop, or doing an international tour where he played duets with himself via computer-programmed piano — consistently evading easy categorization.

“When the Tower Records shops still existed, I had a lot of complaints from the people at the shops, because they didn’t know which CD should go to which box,” he told Film Score Monthly in 2010.

“It seems my listeners accept what I do,” he added. “Finally they recognize, ‘That is Sakamoto. He goes this way, but next time this way.’”