Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion

Taiko Boom

ASIA: LOCAL STUDIES/GLOBAL THEMES

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Kären Wigen,

and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Editors

Taiko Boom

JAPANESE DRUMMING IN PLACE AND MOTION

Shawn Bender

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bender, Shawn Morgan.

Taiko boom : Japanese drumming in place and motion / Shawn Bender. — 1st ed.

    p.         cm. — (Asia : local studies/global themes ; 23)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27241-5 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-27242-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

     1. Taiko—Japan—History.   2. Taiko (Drum ensemble)—Japan—History.   3. Music—Japan.   4. Musical instruments—Japan.   5. Japan—Social life and customs.     I. Title.

ML1038.T35B46    2012

     786.90952—dc23                                                                                                    2012010917

Manufactured in the United States of America

21   20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12

10   9    8   7    6    5    4   3   2     1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC Certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

To my family, for their love and support

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation, Japanese Names, and Romanization

Introduction

PART ONE

THE EMERGENCE AND POPULARIZATION OF TAIKO

1 · Taiko Drums and Taiko Drum Makers

2 · Genealogies of Taiko I: Osuwa Daiko, Sukeroku Daiko, Ondekoza

3 · Genealogies of Taiko II: Ondekoza to Kodo

4 · Placing Ensemble Taiko in Japan: Festival Creation and the Taiko Boom

PART TWO

DISCOURSES OF CONTEMPORARY TAIKO

5 · (Dis)Locating Drumming: Taiko Training, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Race and Place

6 · Woman Unbound? Body and Gender in Japanese Taiko

7 · The Sound of Militarism? New Texts, Old Nationalism, and the Disembodiment of Taiko Technique

Epilogue: Taiko at Home and Abroad

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of Tokyo’s shitamachi area

FIGURES

1. Varieties of ensemble taiko 1

2. Varieties of ensemble taiko 2

3. Festival drums

4. Ōdaiko

5. Okedō-daiko (or daibyōshi)

6. Chū-daiko (or miya-daiko)

7. Cartoon of buraku drummers

8. Kumi-daiko versus drum set

9. Sukeroku Daiko

10. Kodo’s Yatai-bayashi

11. Muhōmatsu plays Kokura gion daiko

12. Ondekoza debuts Ōdaiko

13. Kodo’s Ōdaiko in 1997

14. Festival poster in a Tokyo neighborhood

15. Kodo apprentices practice Yatai-bayashi

16. Women Play Taiko poster

17. Members of Honō Daiko in their costumes, highlighting their muscular physiques

18. A female drummer for Amanojaku posing before an ōdaiko

19. Members of cocon in their stage costumes

20. Cover of Nippon Taiko Foundation brochure

For additional images related to this book, visit www.ucpress.edu/go/taikoboom

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first encounter with taiko drumming occurred quite by chance during my first visit to Japan in 1992. Out of an awareness of my interest in drums and perhaps some annoyance at the incessant finger tapping on the table in our shared office, a work colleague suggested that I check out a Japanese drum workshop he saw advertised at a community center in Kyoto. Little did I know at the time that this one-day taiko workshop would turn into a book project that would take over ten years to complete. Along the way, my passion for the subject has been stoked and supported by a great number of people to whom I remain deeply indebted.

David K. Jordan has been enthusiastic about my research on taiko since I first proposed it as a doctoral dissertation topic. He has been a constant voice of reason and a tireless editor, and this book is much improved as a result of his constructive criticism. Many of the intellectual perspectives that guide the book were developed first in graduate seminars at the University of California, San Diego, with Michael Meeker, who challenged me to think in new ways about theory, anthropology, and scholarship. I am also grateful to Japanese studies faculty at UCSD, especially Stefan Tanaka and Christena Turner, for sharing with me their insights into Japanese society. As part of my doctoral committee, Suzanne Brenner and George Lipsitz offered helpful suggestions that encouraged me to think in new ways about my research. The Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo hosted me during the sabbatical year in which I completed this book. Over the year, Jason Karlin lent a sympathetic ear and offered precious feedback on many of the chapters that follow.

Freddy Bailey, Jeffrey Bass, Marc Moskowitz, James Ellison, Alex Bates, and Christopher Bondy kindly gave me comments on early drafts of chapters, and the book is much better for their suggestions. Mizuho Zako of Oedo Sukeroku Daiko and Melanie Taylor of Kodo proofread portions of the text and saved me from many embarrassing errors. David Leheny, David T. Johnson, and Greg Noble gave me sage advice as the book neared completion. The development of the ideas presented here has also benefited from conversations over the years with Sharla Blank, Bambi Chapin, Steven Carlisle, Zachary Orend, Laura Gonzalez, Ethan Scheiner, Sherry Martin, Richard Miller, Deborah Wong, Riikka LÄnsisalmi, Yoshitaka Terada, Toshio Ochi, Eri Yoshikawa, Takahiro Sakayama, Gill Steel, Helene Lee, Erik Love, and Suman Ambwani. E. Taylor Atkins, Jennifer Milioto Matsue, and one anonymous reviewer read through the complete manuscript, and their thoughtful comments helped improve it considerably. All errors that remain are, of course, my own.

Research for this book was funded by grants from the Japan Foundation, the Social Science Research Council/Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho), the UCSD Department of Anthropology and Japanese Studies Program, and the Dickinson College Research and Development Committee. I have been fortunate to receive support in this project from many members of the North American taiko community, especially Roy and P.J. Hirabayashi, Alan and Merle Okada, and Wynn and Brian Yamami. I am thankful to the members of Kodo for granting me access to their organization and for lending me time for interviews over the course of my extended research with them. Satō Ryūji, Negishi Toshiaki, and Nishita Tarō each took an exceptionally strong interest in my research and gave generously of their time. And though their stories don’t appear on these pages, my hosts on Sado Island, the Kusaka family, who put a roof over my head and taught me much about life in rural Japan, deserve thanks for their warm hospitality.

Kiyomi Kushida of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies helped arrange institutional support for me at the University of Tokyo, provided me with a wealth of scholarly data on the Japanese folk performing arts, and pushed me to improve my understanding of classical and folk performance in Japan. Yoshitaka Terada shared with me his knowledge of buraku taiko and introduced me to the drummers of Taiko Ikari, for which I am deeply grateful. I also appreciate the cooperation of Nitagai Kamon and Robert Robin Early, who were both integral to the smooth start of my fieldwork in Tokyo, and to the members of Sukeroku Daiko, Nihon Taiko Dōjō, and the group I call Miyamoto Daiko for accepting me into their ranks as a beginning drummer. Osuwa Daiko, Oedo Sukeroku Taiko, Kodo, Miyamoto Unosuke Company, Asano Taiko Corporation, Hayashi Eitestu, and Kenny Endo graciously gave me permission to use their beautiful images in this book and on the book’s website. Back home, the analysis of my research data would have taken much longer without the transcription of Japanese interviews by my research assistants Nakamachi Midori, Osone Riiko, Shinohara Emi, and Takazawa Chie.

A version of chapter 5 was published previously as Of Roots and Race: Discourses of Body and Place in Japanese Taiko Drumming (Social Science Japan Journal 8:197–212), and sections of chapter 3 provided the basis for the article "Drumming from Screen to Stage: Ondekoza Ōdaiko and the Reimaging of Japanese Taiko" (Journal of Asian Studies 69:843–867).

I would like to thank my family, to whom this book is dedicated, and the many friends who have encouraged me over the years as I pursued this project. Their gentle prodding helped make this book a reality. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my many editors at the University of California Press, especially KÄren Wigen and Reed Malcolm. Their enthusiasm, patience, and professionalism were much appreciated as this book made its way through the process of publication.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION, JAPANESE NAMES, AND ROMANIZATION

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Japanese are my own.

I have worked throughout the book to preserve the anonymity of those who shared their thoughts on taiko with me. Individuals who have been interviewed for other publications or who gave me formal permission to use their names in print appear here with first and last names. In keeping with Japanese convention, these names are written last name first, except in cases where the individual is well known in the West. All other names are pseudonyms. In addition, the names of professional Japanese taiko groups, such as Osuwa Daiko, Oedo Sukeroku Taiko, and Kodo, are written in the groups’ preferred style of romanization.

Introduction

Ducking inside the rehearsal hall brings relief from yet another sweltering summer day on Sado, the island in northern Japan I have called home for the past several months. I step over the jumble of shoes lining the entrance and make my way up a steep staircase to a high perch on a balcony inside the hall. A seat there offers a view of the scene below: drums and instruments ring the hardwood floor of the hall, roughly the size of a middle school gymnasium; apprentices dressed in casual workout clothes nervously shuffle in, trying their best to remain inconspicuous; managers and staff sit on foldout chairs at the edge of the room, with clipboards firmly in hand and faces focused on the center of the floor. There, seven male drummers are arranged in a row, each sitting cross-legged behind a small shime-daiko drum. Their bodies are still and drawn tight, their expressions blank as if they are fixed in meditation.

The loose bustle of preparation recedes to tense anticipation. Silence slowly envelops the hall, punctuated only by the buzz of cicadas outside and the dull whirr of electric fans. Still, the air is thick with heat and humidity. I tug at my shirt and carefully unfurl a folding fan.

In unison, the drummers place their sticks on the drums in front of them. Almost imperceptibly, a light tapping begins, rapid fire—Te-Ke-Te-Ke-Te-Ke-Te-Ke. The motion of hands alternating right-left, right-left soon becomes visible. The sound grows heavier and fuller. Lightly tapping hands quickly become pounding arms. The drummers push their sticks down toward the center of the drums. Hitting the rim and drum simultaneously, they drive the sound to an ear-splitting crescendo—TA-KA-TA-KA-TA-KA-TA-KA. Their flailing arms become a blur of vertical lines framed by their rigid bodies. Sound swirls around the interior of the hall, slicing like a knife at the planks supporting me. Over whelmed, I cover my ears. Still, the sound reverberates through me. Just as quickly, sound and movement recede to nearly imperceptible once more—Te-Ke-Te-Ke-Te-Ke-Te-Ke. Piercing the silence, the drummers alternate quick staccato rolls. Right to left, left to right, a cascade of furious drumming builds, washing back and forth like waves crashing on waves, until the lead drummer slices through the din—DON-DON-DON-DON.

Silence.

Drummers freeze. Echoes fade. Hair stands on end. Crack! Crack Crack! Drumming begins again, erratically this time. Smacking. Chopping. Slapping. Chaotic strikes replace ordered rhythm until one by one the drummers fall into the steady, synchronized cadence that marks the denouement of Monochrome—TA-KA-TA-KA-TA-KA-TA-KA.

FINDING TAIKO IN JAPAN

I have seen Kodo perform Monochrome countless times, but it never fails to move me as viscerally as it did that summer day. A troupe of drummers and dancers, Kodo established a performance base on Sado Island in the late 1960s. (At the time they performed under the name Ondekoza.)¹ Led by their charismatic founder, the troupe sought to breathe new life into Japan’s folk performing arts by converting folk motifs into dynamic stage performances. They quickly came to be distinguished as much for the intensity of their training regimen as for the impact of their drumming: their American debut performance in 1975 took place soon after they crossed the finish line at the Boston Marathon. Observing this strenuous training regimen and building on a history of domestic and international performance that spans three decades, Kodo has earned a place at the apex of a genre of Japanese performance called kumi-daiko, ensemble taiko drumming.²

Taiko ensembles arrange barrel-shaped wooden drums (taiko) of various sizes and shapes for stage performance, much like an orchestral percussion section. However, the relatively large size of these drums and their strategic placement on stage encourages much more vigorous use of the body in performance than orchestral drumming would. In creating stage performances that explore both the musicality of the taiko drum and the muscularity of taiko drummers, postwar taiko ensembles broke with centuries of Japanese custom whereby these drums were relegated to primarily supporting roles in religious rituals and festival performances. At the same time, these groups resist easy classification as musical alone, since the intricately choreographed movement of performers on stage, typically associated with dance, is a distinctive feature of the new genre (figures 1 and 2).

FIGURE 1. Varieties of ensemble taiko 1: drums in this group are arranged like a drum set and then organized into an ensemble. Photo by Nishita Tarō.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the physically intense and visually spectacular music-cum-dance performances of taiko ensembles drew enthusiastic audiences across Japan, ushering in a veritable taiko boom.³ From just a few dozen in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of taiko groups rose into the thousands by the close of the millennium.⁴ The largest national organization of taiko groups in Japan, the Nippon Taiko Foundation, now counts more than eight hundred groups on its membership rolls. As exhilarating expressions of contemporary culture, taiko groups have performed at major national and international sporting events: exhibitions of drumming at the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998 and at the FIFA World Cup cohosted by Korea and Japan in 2002 followed influential debut performances at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and 1970 Osaka World Expo. Popularity at home has been met with enthusiasm abroad. Professional ensembles routinely tour Europe and the United States, and hundreds of locally based taiko groups have formed in North and South America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia (Terada 2001). Taiko has become a crowd-pleasing staple at Japanese cultural festivals and events around the world. Building on this popular appeal, it has even been converted into a video game. In Taiko no Tatsujin (Taiko Master), an arcade game created by the Japanese company Namco, players use wooden mallets to tap along with a mixture of festival and pop music on an electronic drum shaped like a taiko. The company has released software and hardware home-console versions of Taiko Master, along the lines of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series of video games.⁵ Clearly popular domestically, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performing art.