The concept of decolonization has been important to geographies from various parts of Asia to the Americas. This special issue is the first collection to bring key decolonial writings from Asia and other locations to bear on music and East Asia. Examining really-existing forms of cultural, epistemic, exploitation, settler, and internal coloniality, we demonstrate the necessity of grounding analysis in the historical particularities and discourses of specific geographies. There are two main areas of concern: (1) Exploitation and cultural colonization that is linked to the following—Euro-North American imperialism and the influx of Western musics (hymns, military band music, pop, rock etc.) into East Asia in part via Japan, Japanese colonization in East Asia in the interwar years, and Chinese imperialism over millennia. (2) Minoritization that is linked to settler and internal colonization (e.g. Xinjiang), as well as diasporic marginalization; the key factors here are (i) the asymmetrical relation between majority Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ethnic groups and musics, versus minority and Indigenous musics and peoples in each of the East Asian countries, as well as (ii) marginalization of diasporic peoples and musics from East Asia who migrated around the world.