How an Australian expat became the voice of Japan’s most-famous train

“Welcome to the Tokaido Shinkansen. This is a Nozomi super-express bound for Shin-Osaka Station. We will be stopping at Nagoya and Kyoto stations before arriving at Shin-Osaka terminal.”

That’s a typical announcement from Donna Burke, who may very well be Japan’s most recognizable voice — at least for the tens of millions of people who ride the Tokaido Shinkansen, the country’s most popular bullet train line.

Sixty-year-old Burke is the English-language voice of the Shinkansen, which runs between Tokyo and Osaka daily. 

Her announcements have become the subject of fascination online for travelers worldwide, with Reddit threads praising her smooth, calming and British-accented voice.

“She has literally the most civilized accent in the history of humanity. The first time I heard it, it made me want to meet her so we could discuss global politics or Wittgenstein or something. I figured it would automatically add 20 points to my IQ. I think they should play recordings of her voice at prison riots and former presidents’ rallies, whereupon all the participants will suddenly abandon their mayhem and sit down for a nice cup of tea,” one Reddit commenter named mikenmar said in a forum. 

Most bullet train riders, though, don’t know that Burke is not, in fact, British. She’s an Australian expat who moved to Japan in the 1990s to pursue a music career.

“I started out as a wedding singer,” Burke said. 

One of her most popular songs was “Amazing Grace,” which is often associated with funerals in the US and Australia. 

“But in Japan, they loved having ‘Amazing Grace’ sung by a foreign singer, which denoted that they were sophisticated, cultured — that they had money. It was romance. It was class.”

Burke saw it as an opportunity. She performed six weddings a day, earning $300 for each. She got representation and landed gigs singing for TV commercials. Eventually, she landed jobs voicing and singing for video games, including Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill and Final Fantasy.

As show business often goes, success brought more success. As Burke puts it, she was in the right place at the right time. It was the ’90s and early 2000s, at a time when it was more difficult, she said, to outsource English-language singers and voice actors online.

Another stroke of luck came in 2004 when the Canadian woman who previously did the bullet train announcements was moving out of Japan. JR Central, the company that operates the bullet train, wanted a permanent resident.

So, they had Burke try out. They wanted her to sound just like the person who used to do it—and the previous person wanted to sound just like the person who did it before her, a woman with a calming English accent.

“I’m Australian, mimicking a Canadian, who was mimicking a British woman who was the original voice on the Shinkansen,” Burke said.

So, she put on “a very motherly voice, with a smile. Not too much of a smile, but a smile nonetheless.”

Her real-life voice is more energetic and almost sing-songy — but she pulled it off. She got the job and has been doing it for the past 20 years. 

Yet, despite being heard by people around the country, nobody really knows it’s her because she’s putting on an act.

“No one ever stops me and says you sound just like it [the bullet train voice],” Burke said in her natural Australian accent. “It’s very calming, and that’s not who I am in real life.”