Do we like Ryuichi Sakamoto?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of speaking up for people and the environment, no harmful words found, and only a few small marks like the car ads.
Sakamoto was born in Tokyo in 1952. He co-founded Yellow Magic Orchestra with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, then moved into film. He acted alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and won an Oscar and a Grammy for scoring The Last Emperor. He died on 28 March 2023, aged 71.
The big thing in his public life was Fukushima. After the 2011 meltdowns he turned up at Tokyo rallies and helped organise anti-nuclear concerts. At a 2012 rally he said “Keeping silent after Fukushima is barbaric.” Years later he said the accident was still ongoing and that humans did not know how to bring it under control.
The harm check comes up clean. We found no remarks from him against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or anyone else, and no dodgy company or conspiracy slide. His causes were peace, nuclear safety and the environment. Fair warning that the search was thin on his views on gender and sexuality, so this is silence rather than a ringing endorsement.
His one proper stoush was a 2022 plagiarism row. Internet users alleged that Korean singer-songwriter You Hee-yeol had copied Sakamoto's track “Aqua”. Sakamoto's side said the songs shared some similarities but not enough for legal action. His statement said he could see You's “great respect for my composition”. He had a chance to swing the hammer and didn't.
Not everything was halo-polishing. He appeared in advertising for Nissan electric cars and acknowledged he was criticised for being so commercial. That's a small mark, and a fairly tame one for a man who also powered his New York home with a renewable-energy provider.
Nothing recent has surfaced on him personally, though his estate keeps the work alive. In October 2025 it said it had “removed or issued formal requests to labels” to pull his music from streaming services in Israel, joining the No Music For Genocide campaign. Supporters see a cultural boycott over the war in Gaza. Others see a blunt tool that shuts listeners out. That was the estate's decision after his death, not his own words.