Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto Talks About Cancer, Writing For Movies, And Revenge

“The difference between European and Japanese music is that there is almost no common element, there is nothing shared between them. It’s a very different system. Like languages: the Japanese language is so far away from the European languages. When we see European languages—even English and French—they share 50,000 vocabulary words between them, but compared to the distance of all the European languages and Japanese language, it’s so far away. It’s the same with music. Very different.”