Ryuichi Sakamoto studied composition at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, earning a bachelor's degree in 1974 and a master's in 1976 with a focus on electronic and ethnic music. He began his career in the mid-1970s as a composer, arranger, and producer working across Japan's rock, jazz, and classical scenes, and released his solo debut, Thousand Knives of, in 1978. That same year he co-founded Yellow Magic Orchestra with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, a group that helped define the sound of synth-pop and electropop internationally.

He built one of the more decorated film-scoring careers of his generation. In 1983 he appeared as an actor alongside David Bowie in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and composed the film's score. In 1987, his score for Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, shared with David Byrne and Cong Su — making him the first Japanese composer to win an Academy Award. He went on to score The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993), Pedro Almodóvar's High Heels, Oliver Stone's Wild Palms, and, decades later, The Revenant (2015).

In 1982 he married pianist and singer Akiko Yano, whom he had met and collaborated with during the Yellow Magic Orchestra years. They had a daughter, Miu Sakamoto, before divorcing in 2006. Beyond music, Sakamoto was a committed activist: a member of the anti-nuclear organization Stop Rokkasho, organizer of the 2012 No Nukes concert, and an outspoken critic of copyright law as antiquated for the internet age.

His final years were shaped by illness — he was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer in 2014 and rectal cancer in 2021 — but he continued working, releasing his final studio album, 12, in January 2023 and completing the score for Hirokazu Kore-eda's Monster the same year. He died in Tokyo on March 28, 2023, at 71, of colorectal cancer.

Sakamoto's work spans synth-pop, ambient, orchestral film scoring, and late-career minimalist composition — a range built on his formal training in electronic and ethnic music and his decades-long practice of moving fluidly between popular and art-music contexts.