We’re hosting a new £1.3m (€1.5m) research project, led by Dr Amanda Hsieh, shedding light on the history and impact of the Japanese Empire on the Pacific through music.
SINJA – Singers of the Japanese Pacific: Gender, Race, and Class in the East Asian Empire’s Actor Networks, 1920s–1960s – follows 50 globetrotting singers to uncover stories of people, objects, and ideas that existed during and long after what is normally seen as the fall of the Empire in 1945.
Dr Hsieh is Associate Professor of Musicology at our Department of Music. Her project is funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.
At its height, the Japanese Empire controlled 20 per cent of the world’s population. Few people outside specialist circles know this.
By coining the term “Japanese Pacific”, SINJA makes clear the ambitions and reach of the Japanese Empire, stretching from its East and Southeast Asian territories to Japanese settler communities in the Americas.
Through archival research and oral history collection, SINJA will capture the stories connected to singers who travelled and performed across the Japanese Pacific.
Bringing to light figures who have been obscured in conventional histories of empire, the project will reframe our understanding of singers who were women, mixed-race, and part of the larger movement of people.
It will also reframe our understanding of the Japanese Empire itself, revealing the impact this musical world had on the culture and politics of the Pacific across roughly 50 years.
In addition to books and articles, SINJA will produce a digital map illuminating the journeys and stories related to the singers featured, alongside wider digitised data available for future research.
Collectively, SINJA’s musical networks will expose an empire that, at its height, rivalled the British in the size of the population it controlled, but whose cultural and political impact remains seriously understudied. This work is possible now because multiple newspaper, travel records, and oral history collections have newly opened, and those closest to these histories are still with us – though not for much longer.
ERC Starting Grants are awarded to talented early-career researchers who have already produced excellent work, are ready to work independently, and show potential to be research leaders.
The project will recruit two postdoctoral fellows and draw on expertise from our departments of Geography, History, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures.
Discover more about Dr Amanda Hsieh, who is leading the SINJA project.
Our Department of Music is ranked second in the UK in the Complete University Guide 2027. Visit our Music webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
More about our departments of Geography, History, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures.
See more about the European Research Council’s Starting Grants.
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