List of Japanese composers

This is a list of Japanese composers, arranged by the field in which each is best known and, within each section, in order of birth year.

Western art music reached Japan in earnest only after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when the new government introduced Western-style music into the school curriculum and into the army and navy bands. The first generation of Japanese composers therefore wrote mainly shōka (school songs) and marches; a fully professional concert-music tradition emerged in the 1920s and 1930s around Kōsaku Yamada and the composers of the . Since the 1950s Japanese composers have also become internationally prominent in film, television, animation and video game music, and those fields are listed separately below.

Inclusion criteria: entries should be composers who are the subject of an existing Wikipedia article, or whose notability is supported by an inline citation. Composers active in more than one field are listed once, in the section for which they are best known, with cross-references where useful. An empty death-year field indicates a living composer. Where reliable sources disagree on a date, the alternatives are noted.

Birth and death years in this list have been checked against the Japanese Wikipedia list of Japanese classical composers and against the sources cited for individual entries.