Junko Ueda

Japanese singer and satsuma-biwa player, born in Tokyo and based in Europe. She sings shōmyō, the liturgical chant of the Tendai school of Japanese Buddhism, which she learned from the Tendai monk Kōshin Ebihara, alongside the epic storytelling tradition of the biwa.

She studied composition at the Tokyo College of Music. Since 1995 she has taught shōmyō in workshops internationally, working from the breath, the hara and ma, the interval of silence that carries as much as the sound does. In 2024 she published Shomyo: Exploring the Wisdom of Japanese Buddhist Chant, drawing on her own years of practice and on what the workshops taught her.