In embracing a different set of musical influences than Tanaka, they began to develop the taiko style they learned in San Francisco “into a style that joins the traditional rhythms of Japanese drumming with other world rhythms, including African, Brazilian, Filipino, Latin, and jazz, bridging many styles, while still resonating with the Asian soul in America.” 3 One work composed with this approach was “Gendai ni Ikiru,” which has remained a standard within the San Jose Taiko repertoire for forty years. They drew from the music that they had grown up listening to: rock, jazz, funk, and Latin.
According to founding member PJ Hirabayashi, Tanaka encouraged the members to “go off, and create your music, concentrate on your group.” 2 San Jose Taiko members decided early on to not play the pieces they were learning from Tanaka, but instead compose pieces that embraced their own musical influences. During this time, they learned the basics of the Sukeroku and Osuwa Daiko styles of taiko performance as well as Tanaka’s own emerging style.Īfter one year, Tanaka encouraged the performers to strike out on their own. Taking him up on his offer, beginning in 1974 several members of San Jose Taiko traveled to San Francisco every weekend to attend San Francisco Taiko Dōkōkai practices. Tanaka Seiichi soon learned that a group was beginning activities in San Jose and invited the members to come study with him.
1ĭrawing upon their connection to the Buddhist church, San Jose Taiko began activities with the assistance of Kinnara Taiko members, who taught them not only a few basic pieces but also how to make drums. Through taiko performance, they believe they could “build a community of players to pay homage to the hard work and sacrifice of the Isseiand Nisei– first- and second-generation Japanese Americans – who faced racism and oppression in North America” (Hirabayashi and Hirabayashi 2005). The idea of community building was particularly important given efforts at the time to revitalize San Jose’s Japantown, one of only three such neighborhoods remaining in the United States (the others being in San Francisco and Los Angeles).
To the young activists, a taiko was the perfect instrument for their purposes as San Jose Taiko founding members Roy and PJ Hirabayashi later stated, “a loud, in-your-face art form with Asian roots seemed the ideal contemporary cultural catalyst for community building” (Hirabayashi and Hirabayashi 2005). In 1973, they founded San Jose Taiko as part of the Young Buddhist Association at the San Jose Buddhist Church (Otsuka 1997, 31). In early 1970s San Jose, a group of community activists that were working to develop services for issei– the first generation of Japanese immigrants to the United States – found themselves drawn to taiko performance “because it was strong, loud, Japanese, and required a group of players” (Hirabayashi and Hirabayashi 2005). Their children, however, battled “what was viewed as the stiff assimilationist outlook of their parents’ generation and the prevalent stereotype of the ‘quiet Japanese’” (Fromartz and Greenfield 1998).
Following the internment of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent on the Pacific coast, many second-generation Japanese-Americans had adopted a policy of assimilation, looking to not stand out. Socially- and politically-conscious Asian-American youth and young adults were searching for a means to express a sense of ethnic identity that had been lost post-World War II, particularly amongst the Japanese-American community. The introduction of contemporary taiko performance to the United States in the late 1960s occurred during the development of “a nascent Asian American political consciousness and an emphasis on ethnic solidarity”(Yoon 2001, 422).