Shoko Araya is a Japanese marimbist, percussionist, composer, singer-songwriter, and educator. She graduated from Kunitachi College of Music with the Takeoka Prize and received second prize in the Japan Wind and Percussion Competition. An Asian Cultural Council grant supported her percussion study at the University of Michigan and observation of contemporary music in the United States during the 1987–88 academic year; she later completed a master’s degree in percussion at Michigan. Her teachers included Tomoyuki Okada, Michael Udow, Yoshihisa Mizuno, Midori Takada, and Bob Becker.
Araya has appeared as a marimba soloist at the Patras International Festival in Greece and the Taipei International Percussion Convention, and has performed at the University of Michigan and New York’s Lincoln Center with the Michigan Percussion Ensemble. With Christopher Hardy she formed the Tokyo-based Chris and Shoko Percussion Duo. Her collaborators have included Eitetsu Hayashi, Reichi “CHABO” Nakaido, Hidetaro Honjo, John Kaizan Neptune, Masataka Hirano, Kazumi Watanabe, Shuichi Hidano, and other artists working across classical, traditional, jazz, and rock music.
Her original formats include singer-songwriter performance with marimba and voice and the story-based Shoko Araya Marimba Theater. She has composed and performed music for theater and spoken-word productions, including works by playwright Sō Kitamura, and several of her body-percussion pieces have appeared in Japanese high-school music textbooks. Alongside university percussion teaching, she has developed participatory rhythm and percussion workshops for concert and community settings.
Araya’s recordings include Rosewood Singer, featuring a collaboration with Reichi Nakaido, Journey, and the ambient marimba project Marimba Call, released under the name Quiet Green in 2024 from a 2021 recording that incorporates environmental sound from Hachioji. She remained active in 2026, including a sold-out May duet concert with Nakaido, and continues as a Marimba One artist. In 2017 she received the Aomori Prefecture Culture Award in the instrumental-music category for her performance and educational work.