Many things have probably been said about The Professor, aka Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）, since he dabbled in a lot of different genres. "Not boring" would be one such phrase.
Certainly this song of his titled "Calling From Tokyo" which leads his November 1989 album "Beauty"（ビューティー）has quite its fair share of story behind it. Some years ago, I discovered that he'd harboured a long fascination for various types of ethnic music and studied ethnomusicology in university. "Calling From Tokyo" might be one result of his studies and experimentation. According to the J-Wiki article on "Beauty", Sakamoto had at one point dubbed the song "Jazz" but Virgin Records which was the label for the album convinced him to change it (good call, Virgin).
There's nothing really jazzy about "Calling From Tokyo" unless we're approaching something close to smooth jazz here. It is, though, a smoky mélange of musical spiciness with West African influences, a soupcon of Japanese traditional, Okinawan chants and a whole lot of World Music (which I don't have as a Label here) among other "ingredients". Perhaps after a few listens to it, people may want to head out to get some rich stew at a restaurant somewhere.
Sakamoto did apparently get his original title for his song as it was placed as "Jazz #1" on the "Black Rain" soundtrack. By the way, it was not only Sakamoto behind the lyrics (and music) but also guitarist Arto Lindsay and Roger Trilling. Some of the vocals were provided by the Brian Wilson and Youssou N'Dour.
A version of "Calling From Tokyo" without any major vocals but with a few techno flourishes was included under the title of "Laser Man" as a track on Sakamoto's July 1989 single "Undo #1"（アンドゥ＃1）. It was apparently used as the theme song for a movie called "The Laser Man".
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