Sayo Sakamoto is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. Her research examines Japanese popular music, memory, and cultural history, with a particular focus on how nostalgia shaped ideas of national identity in postwar Japan. Drawing on musicology, history, and cultural theory, she explores how popular songs mediated experiences of social change, modernization, and loss, while creating shared understandings of the past. Her broader research interests include Japanese popular music, sound studies, media history, memory studies, and modern Japanese cultural history.

She is currently completing her dissertation, Songs of Nostalgia: Imagined Times and Places in Japanese Popular Music, which examines Japanese popular songs from 1945 to 1972 as cultural sites where competing narratives of postwar experience were produced and contested. By treating popular music as a historical archive, her research demonstrates how nostalgia functioned as a cultural mechanism through which postwar Japan reimagined history, memory, and nationhood.