Taiko

It’s coming up on November again, which means another International Taiko Festival in Berkeley and another post where I tell people they should check it out. The tickets are more than a little pricey, but it’s usually a spectacular show. If anybody out there’s planning to go, let me know so’s I don’t have to sit there by myself.

Until then, I’ve got the first of my home movies from Tokyo up on the interweb. I’d been hoping to see a genuine taiko performance in Japan, but didn’t know where to look. On one of my days off, I was headed through Yoyogi Park on the way to the Meiji Shrine, followed the sound of far-off drumming, and wandered right into the middle of the Tokyo Sri Lanka Festival. There I caught the tail end of a taiko performance on stage. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so I don’t know the name of the group that was performing.

The videos suffer a little from the compression, and the fact that I can’t hold a camera steady on account of my condition, but the basic idea’s there. Here’s their final performance (about 7 minutes):

and its encore (about 2 and a half minutes):