This special issue includes contributions by prominent music researchers based in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Australia. One of the first attempts to present scholarly work on music in colonial era East Asia in a thematically coordinated manner, the issue delineates diverse experiences of colonialism and modernity among musicians in Korea, Taiwan, Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and naichi or 'home islands' Japan. A study of musical interface between French colonists and Vietnamese in prewar Hanoi offers a comparative perspective on music and colonial modernity in what had formerly been part of the cultural Sinosphere.