Folk Masters by Bergey Barry

Author:Bergey, Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

SEIICHI TANAKA

San Francisco, California | 2001

Students call me “master,” but I feel like I am always a student…. You always have to keep learning taiko until it is in you.

Seiichi Tanaka founded the first taiko dojo (taiko school) in North America in 1968. He attended the 1967 Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco’s Japantown and was amazed to see that there was no taiko drumming. The son of a professional baseball player who also had an athletic bent, he returned to Japan to study with masters of taiko. He came back to San Francisco a year later to perform at the annual festival and to found the San Francisco Taiko Dojo. Taiko is a form of ritual drumming that incorporates meditation, philosophy, martial arts, and choreography. Performance on the barrel-shaped drums of many sizes is accompanied by vigorous movement, shouts, and the playing of woodwinds such as the shakuhachi. Today taiko has become attractive to audiences as a form of performance. It requires discipline, intense study, and commitment from the thousands of students Tanaka has trained. There are more than two hundred taiko groups in the United States today, most owing their existence to the efforts of Seiichi Tanaka.

Seiichi Tanaka stands in front of the array of drums used in taiko performance. He is holding the bachi, or sticks, used to strike the drums. Over his right shoulder is the Odaiko, a large drum that can be up to twelve feet high and weigh over 700 pounds. It is very difficult to stretch the cow skins tightly enough over these huge drums, made of a hollowed-out trunk of a tree. Tanaka innovated the idea of using car jacks to accomplish this feat.

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