Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto dead at 71

[Doctor_Faustus]

I’ve said it before: that song has a totally different context for me, which doesn’t make it less powerful. On the contrary.

Ryuichi Sakamoto's moving piano rendition of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

I, like many Germans over a certain age, associate this tune not with the movie it was written for, but with journalist Gerd Ruge’s series of travel documentaries, many of which chronicled the transformation of the former Soviet states from just after the fall of the USSR to the first decade of the 2000s. [Gerd Ruge: Rund um Moskau (2009)] Nothing is more evocative of the “Wild East” for me as “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”

1995 Gerd Ruge unterweg von petersburg nach Moskau