Editing Katari Taiko (section)

==The Beginning: 1979 – 1981==
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KT’s history story begins in the late 1970s, and has a lot to do with the development of the Powell Street Festival, a community festival that brings Japanese and Japanese-Canadian cultural traditions back to the old nihonmachi or “Japan-Town” on the Downtown East Side. 

The Japanese taiko group Ondekoza played at Powell Street in 1978, and the next year, San Jose Taiko played at the festival. Connie Kadota recalled that the San Jose performance in particular was “a real catalyst along with the fact that most, if not all of them were sansei [third-generation Japanese-Canadian] and mainly women.” Like the women and men founding other taiko ensembles in Canada and the US, the collection of individuals that became KT were also inspired by the social movements and liberation struggles of women, people of colour, gays and lesbians, and others. 

According to former member Lucy Komori, “a lot of the early North American taiko groups, started playing as an extension of their political work in the Yellow Power Movement (yes, there was such a thing). Racist policies of Canada forced separation, dispersal, and assimilation. Forming a group of all Asian members to play an ancestral music was not only culturally, but also politically, daring in the racist climate of North America.” And although taiko has its origins in Japan, from the very beginning KT has had non-Nikkei [Japanese descent] members. As Chinese-Canadian member Paul Yee put it, “taiko was an opportunity to reclaim visibility. All my life, I knew I had an Asian face. Most of the time, I had wanted to hide it, deny I looked different. But here, suddenly, my Asian face let me fit into a group that was Japanese, not Chinese, a group that wielded tremendous power through music.”

And so in late 1979, with a borrowed taiko and lots of old tires, KT began to learn to drum, first at the Buddhist Church in Steveston, a community with its own rich Nikkei heritage, and later at the Strathcona Community Centre in Chinatown. In the winter of that year, we invited Seiichi Tanaka of the San Francisco Taiko Dojo to give us a workshop. The only taiko sensei (teacher) in North America, and often credited with introducing the art form to the US and Canada, Tanaka-sensei stayed a week, teaching us the basic technical skills as well as some of the history and philosophy of taiko. Rick Shiomi remembered it this way: “There were some memorable moments, such as all of us at Strathcona Community Centre doing our ich nis for what seemed forever, while Tanaka-sensei went out for a walk. And of course, there was the infamous time when Tanaka-sensei made us go to hell and back again to get the last beat of one song together. I remember his disdain burning us like a torch and turning soft ore into steel. As Tanaka-sensei always said, no pain, no gain.”

Tanaka-sensei’s generosity and fierceness set us on the path, and we continued by learning new skills on our own, developing a KT style, and building a tradition of discipline and commitment. It wasn’t always easy; many members didn’t exactly know that what they were getting into. Joyce Chong remembers that “it was never like, ‘this is what you’re committed to,’ ‘this is what you’re gonna be doing.’ It’s like going along, going along, and it was all kind of a surprise.” And of course, actually coming up with drums was a huge issue. Jan Woo described the process: “Building your own means using barrels. Thirty years ago that meant Sweeney Cooperage under the Granville Street Bridge. Buy a bunch of barrels. They were about $20 to $25 each, so how many in a ‘bunch’ depended more on your enthusiasm and naïveté than it did on your wallet. Buy a bunch of skins…. Buy some Japanese taiko drum tacks – plan ahead as they take about six months to get here. Get some furniture tacks: cheap and easy. Of course after a year or two you discover that furniture tacks are made of two pieces (the head and the shaft) and the vibration of drumming will eventually loosen these pieces and cause them to turn into a rattle. Tacky.” Add to that drum stands, drum cases, percussion instruments, costumes, and everything else, and Jan points out, “believe me that we say this with pride: we build our own.”

As the group (and its instruments) took shape, we adopted the name Katari Taiko, which means “talking drums” in Japanese. And less than two years after we first came together, in the spring of 1981, KT gave our first public performance in – of all places – Faro, Yukon.