Minako Waseda

Minako Waseda is a Professor at Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo. She received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with the dissertation titled Japanese American Musical Culture in Southern California: Its Formation and Transformation in the 20th Century. Her monograph, based on the dissertation with revision and expansion, Amerika Nikkei shakai no ongaku bunka (Kyōwakoku, 2022), received the Tanabe Hisao Prize in 2023. Her publications in English include: "Chapter 23. Japanese Popular Songs in the Twentieth Century: Adaptation, Hybridity, and Creativity" in Handbook of Japanese Music in the Modern Era (Brill, 2023); "Chapter 2. Musical Activities of Japanese Migrants in Pre-World War II California: Implications for the Realisation of Multicultural Coexistence" in Unsilent Strangers: Music, Minorities, Coexistence, Japan (National University of Singapore Press, 2023); "Naniwa-bushi in Hawai‘i: The Rise and Fall of a Japanese Narrative Art in Diaspora," Yearbook for Traditional Music 52 (2020): 93-126; and “Music in Japanese American Concentration Camps: The Film Hidden Legacy and its Impacts on Collective Memory,” Témoigner (Testimony Between History and Memory) 124 (2017): 113-123. She is also working in collaboration with Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto on the Japanese American Oral History Digital Archive , an ongoing project dedicated to preserving and sharing Japanese American experiences related to performing arts and concentration camps.