Chapter Title: Looking, Listening, and Moving

Book Title: Louder and Faster

Book Subtitle: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko
Book Author(s): Deborah Wong
Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvr7fch1.7

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 1

Looking, Listening, and Moving

M U SIC A S A P R O B L E M

Taiko is music, noise, visual spectacle, corporeal knowledge, and an archive of

Asian American hope. It exceeds all these categories in some ways, but it is also
subject to the many binary ideologies maintaining mind/body and music/dance as
separate. The spectacle of taiko is shaped by powerful ideologies even as it some-
times challenges them.
The ephemerality of music poses a series of analytical challenges. Put simply,
sound doesn’t stand still: it moves through time. The sound of music is a moving
presence that refuses to be pinned down for examination or revisitation. What
can be examined are representations of sound—notated music or recordings, for
instance—and there are many, many ways to analyze or to interpret those objects;
indeed, entire fields are devoted to those projects (e.g., “music theory”). But the
thing itself—“music”—is slippery, fleeting, and a significant ideological problem
for ethnomusicologists (Wong 2014, 347–49).
“Music” is especially vexing for ethnomusicologists (as compared to historical
musicologists, composers, or music theorists).1 Ethnomusicologists study sound
as culture: we approach music as part or even constitutive of culture.2 (Musi-
cal) Sound is inextricably embedded in everything else that makes up culture and
society. Some ethnomusicologists choose to focus on music as sound alone—that
is, they spend their careers focused on the notes, the sounds, and trying to under-
stand the relationships between rhythms, melodies, repertoires, and the like—but
such ethnomusicologists are presently few in number. Most of us end up consider-
ing far more than the sound of music: we tend to believe that music makes sense
only if you understand its relationship to political structures, religion, history,
gender and sexuality, local and global economies, environment, social aesthetics.
One might ask why ethnomusicologists seem concerned about so much besides
the music. Ethnomusicologists are essentially anthropologists who study music,
so we regard music as more than notes or sound: we understand it more broadly

29

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30    Looking, Listening, and Moving

as performance, or as part of a range of expressive behaviors that are beautifully

and exuberantly difficult to contain. As the ethnomusicologist Matthew Rahaim
(2012, 1) asks, “What do we miss if we reduce music to sound?”
I have often not addressed formal musical structures, for instance in my schol-
arly work on the musics of Thailand and Asian America (Wong 2001, 2004). I am
deeply distrustful of traditional music analysis, even though I know my sweeping
generalization ignores the spectrum of possibilities presented by the field of con-
temporary music theory. I’m not alone in my uneasiness. The music theorist Fred
Maus (2003) writes that music analysis sets up an opposition between “composi-
tion versus performance, music itself versus experience, structure versus embodi-
ment.” Taiko is a profoundly corporeal practice, yet taiko players are inexorably
shaped by the aesthetic ideology that makes it possible to isolate the music from
the rest of the sensorium, even when we generate a rhythm entirely shaped by
how we want to swing our left arm in that phrase. The things I want to understand
about taiko music are fundamentally at odds with the principles and ideologies of
music analysis.3 My work has been vulnerable to the criticism that I don’t address
the music itself. Naturally, I am profoundly affected by musical sound, but the
music itself is never just the sounds or the notes. Taiko forces me to address musi-
cal sound because it is that and so much more. So the challenge is how we can
address musical sound without activating all the old moves that objectify it.
Taiko is noise as well as music. While this is true of all music, percussion more
easily spills over from one social category to the other. Percussion is notoriously
difficult to record because it “goes into the red”—that is, the attack and fast decay
create a sound signal marked by clipping, the distortion that occurs when an
amplifier is overdriven. These technical and acoustic properties are also wonder-
fully metaphorical. Noise is part of percussion’s radical potential. Caroline Polk
O’Meara (2013, 15) writes that “noise has a dual status as a category at once inside
and outside of musical systems of knowledge.” The French and French Cana-
dian tradition of casseroles—street protest percussion featuring pots and pans—
is almost too synecdochic (Sterne 2012). I am certain audiences and performers
are so thrilled by outdoor percussion traditions like samba, samulnori, and taiko
because these powerfully activate the sound-body-environment relationship. The
uncontrollable spread of the sound through bodies and neighborhoods suggests
something a bit dangerous even as we delight in its careful arrangement into
rhythms. As an ethnomusicologist I won’t offer an essentialized theory of percus-
sion, since all percussion and indeed noise, like all politics, is local. Avant-garde
twentieth-century musics intentionally driven toward noise were often exploring
futurist modes that rearranged the relationship between the body and agency,
subjectivity, and experience. Noise has long played a key role in popular musics,
and rock as a sprawling family of genres has long featured noise, from overloaded
electrified timbres to noise rock as a genre. Indeed, O’Meara (2013, 14–15) argues
that noise rock was a strategy to deconstruct and remake the rock tradition by
deliberately rejecting any stable set of authoritative practices, but she also notes

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    31

that noise as an intervention is constantly at risk of being reabsorbed as simply a

different kind of order. Similarly, Kenneth Igarashi (1997) has explored how cer-
tain traditions of free improvisation are continually resituated as noise, and how
noise as an intentional genre developed accepted practices in the late 1970s and
early 1980s in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Audiences, musi-
cians, and sound engineers have complicated learned processes for identifying
noise, filtering it out, or rejecting it. As Pamela Nash and Kevin Malone (2000,
105) note, “Noise is ever-present in the physical action of making and recording
music. Players and listeners are taught to filter it out, composers pretend it doesn’t
exist, and recording engineers strive to reduce it in their medium.”
Taiko is not explicitly conceived as noise by anyone I know, but its disciplined
tumult is key to its affective hold over practitioners and audiences.4 The experience
of being inside its noise walks the line between pain and exultant delight in its din.5
Loudness/volume alone isn’t the only politicized parameter, though I note that one
of my colleagues, an art music composer, has told me with regret that he can’t attend
the taiko class recitals because they kick his tinnitus into high gear. The inability
to block out the sound of taiko—to silence it—can prompt extreme responses.
Many years ago on my campus, in the middle of an end-of-quarter outdoor taiko
class recital, a faculty member burst out of her nearby classroom, rushed over to
Rev. Tom Kurai, who was leading the group, and literally shouted at him that we
had to stop playing because she couldn’t hear herself lecture. She lost it, you could
say, and I was struck by how the noise shook her loose from any polite or reasoned
response. Her perception of our playing as noise was both a matter of decibels and,
I’m certain, an instinctively classed and racialized response. If Rev. Tom had been
wearing a tuxedo, she probably would not have so easily claimed the right to shout
at him while he was in the middle of leading a performance.

A NA LY Z I N G “A R A NA M I”

Taiko activates relationships between order and disorder, and it forces a consid-
eration of the organized structures of rhythm versus chaos. I will explore these
issues by considering one “piece,” though I intend to immediately complicate the
very notion of the “piece” or “work” in several ways. Rev. Tom, my teacher and
the leader of the taiko class recital mentioned above, created “Aranami” in 1997.
Notice that I say “created” rather than “wrote”: the idea of “writing” a piece of
music is inextricably bound up with Western ideas of musical composition and
music notation and immediately raises all the problems that I am writing against.
It is generally assumed in the Western art music tradition that music is notated,
that that notation is prescriptive (i.e., it tells performers what to do), that it was put
down by an individual creator known as a composer, and that the notated object is
more authoritative than any single performance. When Rev. Tom created the piece
that he named “Aranami,” he was the director of Kishin Daiko, a community-based
taiko group in Southern California. One could say that he created “Aranami” “for”

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32    Looking, Listening, and Moving

them, but as time went on he parted ways with Kishin and taught other groups, so
“Aranami” was learned and played by a number of taiko ensembles, most recently
Satori Daiko, to which I belonged.6 The piece was thus disseminated by Rev. Tom,
and according to the etiquette of the taiko world, each group plays only pieces that
its members created together, that their teacher created, that they received directly
from another teacher, or that are explicitly known as open source.7 Anything else
is a bit unseemly. In fact, it would be in extremely bad taste to “lift” a piece from
another group by learning it from a recording without their permission. One could
say that “Aranami” exists only in relation to Rev. Tom: no taiko player would play
it without acknowledging that it came from Rev. Tom. (To listen to “Aranami,” go
to http://wonglouderandfaster.com.)
Was Rev. Tom the “composer” of “Aranami”? The simplest answer is yes, but
the conceptual field defining a composer is historically, culturally, and ideologi-
cally complex. The Western art music tradition understands composers as indi-
viduals (as opposed to groups), who create pieces of music full blown, out of their
imaginations, each of which is idiosyncratic and unique.8 “Aranami” is and isn’t
utterly unique. Rev. Tom drew from a vocabulary of formulaic rhythmic motives
to create it (see Lord 1960), and he employed one of four standard ji, or taiko
“base lines,” as they are called in English, to underlie it. That is, the small, high-
pitched drum known as shime-daiko plays teke-teke-teke-teke (continuous eighth
notes) throughout. The patterns that make up the piece are found in many other
works for taiko, in many other groups: don don don don, doko-doko-doko-doko,
su-don su-don don, and so on. Rev. Tom’s compositional gesture lay in ordering
these motives in a certain way, dividing them across different taiko in particular
ways, and situating them in his students—“composing” with the expectation that
these sounds would (at least initially) be played by the musicians closest to him.
It is clear that he was proud of how widespread “Aranami” became, because this is
metonymic of his impact as a teacher.
Rev. Tom regarded himself as the composer of “Aranami”: he was quite aware of
the Western art music complex defining pieces and composers, and he listed him-
self in concert programs as its composer, often including the year 1997 as its com-
position date. He gave the work a name—a title—to indicate that it had its own
identity as distinct from other pieces for taiko. He always translated “Aranami” as
“turbulent waves.” By giving it a Japanese name, he located the work as Japanese
American / Japanese. Sometimes he described “Aranami” as part of a “trilogy”
with “Ame no Mori” (Forest of rain) and “Arashi” (Storm), because although they
were not written to constitute a larger unit or group, they all have names that refer
to water. Rev. Tom named many of his pieces after nature, in Japanese, and thus
located himself within a traditional Japanese aesthetics of nature . . . which suggests
that certain signs and symbols are coded across the Japanese American–Japanese
divide and acquire power and significance in each culture via the logics of heritage
and orientalism.

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    33

One could analyze “Aranami” using the tools of traditional Western art music
theory, which would probably mean focusing entirely on rhythm and would
also probably leave many traditional theorists at a loss, because the rhythms in
themselves are not particularly “complex.” A structural or formal analysis would
have the same problems, as “Aranami” is quickly and easily described as having
ten phrases or motives that are repeated four times, and then the piece is over.
“Aranami” is a short work, as are most of Rev. Tom’s compositions. Like many if
not most North American kumi-daiko pieces, it is solidly in duple meter. Music
theorists often treat percussion pieces as if they are entirely “about” rhythm, but
one could also analyze their pitch and dynamics, which in taiko are related to
the size of the drum. In “Aranami,” Rev. Tom depicted crashing waves program-
matically in at least two ways, through rhythm but especially through dynamics
and pitch. Two phrases feature different-sized drums in a call-and-response pat-
tern: the chudaiko play one line alone, and the lower-pitched odaiko answer with
another. Also, the crescendos in some of the phrases near the end of the piece
create huge, swelling waves.
Taiko players often learn pieces not only by playing them but also by “speaking”
them—that is, by learning mnemonic syllables called kuchi shōga (kuchi, “mouth”;
shōga, “song”), discussed in the introduction. (See figure 2, Rev. Tom Kurai’s mne-
monic notation for “Aranami,” at http://wonglouderandfaster.com.) These syllables
address only rhythm, and somewhat inexactly at that. Although these mnemonics
are written down and then regarded as notation by taiko players, it would be dif-
ficult if not impossible to learn a piece from such notation: it is always necessary to
hear the piece, whether played or spoken, to learn it. When taiko players “speak”
through such mnemonic patterns as part of their learning or review process, they
add a number of elements not present in the syllables themselves: they often move
their hands as if they were holding drumsticks (bachi), to associate right-hand and
left-hand strokes with particular syllables, and they “speak” dynamics not only
through the volume of their voices but usually through relative pitch as well. A
crescendo is mnemonically spoken by starting soft and low and ending loud and
high. I would venture to say that this is how taiko players hear such lines when
they play them on a drum.
These mnemonics are standard for taiko players. Many groups learn pieces
orally, by rote. West Coast community groups use Western staff notation only
rarely; when pieces are written down, mnemonics are most common, though a
range of written techniques are used (e.g., some groups put the syllables in boxes,
with each box representing one four-beat measure). Don means a quarter note
at medium volume; DON is a loud quarter note; doko is two loud eighth notes,
usually right hand followed by left hand; tsuku is two soft eighth notes, usually
right hand followed by left hand; teke is two eighth notes on the small high-
pitched drum (shime-daiko); and so on. The relationships between purely “musi-
cal” parameters of this sort are only part (and perhaps the least) of the ways that

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34    Looking, Listening, and Moving

taiko players experience and understand the works that they play. There are other
ways to understand the “work” of taiko, and I mean quite deliberately to play with
the idea of the “work” as an isolatable musical object and the corporeal, sensual,
spiritual, and political labor that goes into creating the complex of understand-
ings called taiko. Another way of addressing taiko methodologically is through the
body, which opens up a host of issues. Rather than think of music as a sound object,
I want to move toward a conception of music as body: the movement of music
through bodies over time, and between bodies (both within and across time), the
placement of music within particular bodies and its generation by particular bod-
ies, the linkages created between bodies through sound, and the metaphorical leap
from the corporeal, material body to the body politic and the body of the com-
munity. Resituating the music object onto/into bodies has radical implications and
would work for any “piece” or tradition of music; this methodology moves the dis-
cussion away from an isolated thing, which requires much focused effort to identify
its shape and its boundaries, and instead toward the connective traces of processes
and activities across time and space. It offers both a material and a metaphorical
means for regarding the work of music—that is, the things that music does.
For taiko, the pleasure of such an analysis is doubled because this tradition is
explicitly (emically) grounded in a social, philosophical, and political aesthetic of
the body. Taiko is intensely physical, and it represents a corporeal aesthetic system
that is both Buddhist in origin and decidedly contemporary in its realization. The
kind of kumi-daiko I learned from Rev. Tom is explicitly based in Buddhist con-
cepts linking the mind, the body, and the spirit via the principle of ki, energy. Ki
is the vital energy that can be realized physically but is in fact mental and spiritual
as well; it blurs and even collapses distinctions between the physical, the spiri-
tual, and the mental.9 The pragmatics of how ki is used and actualized in taiko
comes from the Japanese martial arts, to which the taiko master Seiichi Tanaka
(the founder and director of San Francisco Taiko Dojo) explicitly connected taiko
by calling his school a dojo and drawing on such martial arts principles as ki and
kata. His theories and approach are consistently activated by North American
taiko practitioners to theorize the complex of mind/body/spirit that is viewed as
central to taiko (Varian 2013, 81–95). The body is thus always more than the body:
it is understood as a corporeal realization of vital principles that exist beyond
the body, but without demoting the body to secondary importance. The primacy
of kata, “stance,” in taiko and the martial arts bespeaks this. Taiko practitioners
give much attention to the body. At the very least, warm-up exercises precede
all rehearsals, and the Japanese groups Ondekoza and Kodo are (in)famous for
their extreme physical regimens, focused on long-distance running (Ondekoza
members participated in the Boston Marathon before a full-length concert; Kodo
apprentices are expected to run up to ten miles every morning before rehearsal).
Preparing the body in these ways prepares the mind and spirit for the “work” of
taiko. Bodily experience is something that taiko players like to talk about and to
theorize. Blisters and aching muscles are honorable parts of the taiko experience,

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    35

but they speak most deeply to the centrality of the corporeal/spiritual conjuncture
in taiko (see chapter 6). Some groups bring beginning students into the tradition
through physical exercises, introducing them to the drums and “the music” only
after weeks or even months of bodily training. In her groundbreaking monograph
on Japanese dance (nihon buyo), Tomie Hahn (2007, 67) emphasizes the organic
links between ki, kata, and hara, the abdomen as the physical location for ki in the
human body and the bodily site from which motion begins: “Japanese aesthet-
ics and concepts of the body are integrally linked.” The hara exemplifies this: it is
located in a physical place on the body (just below the belly button), and all bodily
stances (kata) emanate from it; although your kata may be technically correct, you
cannot move with ki unless that movement begins in the hara. A drum stroke, a
karate strike, and a dance step are all manifestations of ki that begins in the hara.
The ki/hara/kata complex offers an approach to performance that is simultane-
ously physical, spiritual, and mental.
“Aranami” is a bodily experience, both individual and shared. Rev. Tom tended
toward minimal choreography (unlike some groups, who put extensive effort into
choreography for its own sake), with few unnecessary movements. In “Aranami,”
as in many of his other works, the individual players stay put throughout, standing
solidly in front of each drum (whether shime-daiko, chudaiko, or odaiko). Playing
“Aranami” makes you feel strong, and this is all in the upper body, since the lower
body doesn’t move at all. Starting out with strong, steady, repeated strikes (don
don don don) rather than a more complex or involved set of rhythmic motives is
strong; doubling the density of those repeated strikes (doko doko doko doko)—and
thus doubling the effort—is strong. The repeated gesture of accented downbeats
with the right hand is strong: the sensation of flicking out those accents—of raising
the right arm a little more and then flinging the extra ki out along the arm, from
shoulder to elbow, then through the forearm, snapped through the wrist and out
the length of the bachi—is strong. Moreover, these repeated accents and the physi-
cal gesture creating them, just described, are a physical representation of a wave.
Certainly, this happens too quickly to register visually for a viewer, nor do taiko
players explicitly think or talk about the motion this way, but if you slowed down
video footage of the right arm as it pushed out these strong accented downbeats, it
would register as a retreating and advancing wave.
Another key gesture in “Aranami” is the four-count “rest” in the middle. Soni-
cally, nothing happens in that rest except that the lone shime-daiko continues to
play the base line (though one of our shime players is fond of jazzing up this mea-
sure). Again, a sound-focused analysis would miss the point of this “rest,” which
is anything but a rest. It is filled with the slow, considered movement of raising
the right arm from the drumhead to full extension above the head. At its best and
most ki-filled realization, raising the arm doesn’t begin straight from the drum-
head but is rather preceded by a quick pull back that allows the player to bring
the bachi up from below in a scooping and arcing motion, literally pushing the
bachi up, leading with its tip in a movement that actually generates a tremendous

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36    Looking, Listening, and Moving

amount of ki as the arm goes up to full extension. You can feel your body fill up
with additional ki if you do this. You find yourself instinctively inhaling through
the entire motion, the entire measure, filling yourself up with air, expanding the
chest. The next phrase—SU-don, SU-don don—is explosive for two reasons. First,
its expenditure of ki matches and exceeds the generation of ki in the “silent” mea-
sure preceding it. Second, the half-beat “rest” at the beginning of the phrase—the
first su—generates yet more ki, but in a slightly different way from the measure
preceding it. Taiko players don’t experience that half beat as empty: it is marked
with the mnemonic su, and this may be literally shouted or may be sounded in the
head, silently (though at this point there is no distinction between sound heard
and sound silently felt). Furthermore, the movements most filled with ki always
have a pronounced beginning. That is, the most ki-filled movements are propelled
into motion via a slight drawing back or pulling up in a quick, small gesture that
makes all the difference. In other words, the arm doesn’t just start moving: an extra
small movement gets the big movement into motion. It is like a kick start, and it
too generates ki. Rev. Tom explained and demonstrated this in his classes; again,
this is part of the theory of taiko and ki. The half-beat “rest” at the beginning of
this measure should be filled with that kick start—that is, the arm should already
be fully extended above the head as it arrives at the end of its arc from below, but
in that split second of su, you raise your arm through the shoulder a few inches
higher still. Indeed, that small additional lift starts all the way down in your feet—
you may even lift up from your toes—and at this point it becomes evident that the
lower body has not been immobile and uninvolved through all of this. Rather, that
arc from below may be visually defined by the right arm, but it is galvanized by a
slight pivoting rise through the legs and torso. The kick start involves the entire
body, really: the reach upward is created from below, starting down at the toes and
rising through the legs to torso to shoulder to arm to bachi. Rise up into the kick
start and bring the right arm down on don at the same time as you explosively
exhale . . . and as you simultaneously raise the left arm in a scissors motion to
put it into position for the next movement. If you are doing this correctly, every-
thing comes from the hara: certainly, your abdominal muscles should be tight and
engaged, but your ki should burst out from your solar plexus and down your legs
and out your arms and into your bachi and through your bachi into the drum.
This is a complex set of kinesthetic relationships, you might say, to create such
a small moment. Yet it is metonymic of a bodily theory of taiko. It has taken me a
long paragraph to unpack the physical movements in one measure of “Aranami,”
so this is a microanalysis at best, but it also addresses a number of assumptions.
How should we think about the relationship between sound and movement? It
is a problem of vocabulary and more: shall I say that the movement is “behind”
the sounds, or that the movement “drives” the sounds? Neither metaphor really
works. “Fronting” and “backing” aren’t accurate descriptions of the sound-body
relationship—the theory of ki makes that clear. Nor is sound simply a consequence

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    37

of something more primary—movement isn’t in the driver’s seat of the sound

machine. Rather, the circular, synergistic set of relationships between body, ki,
and sound is made visible and audible when a microanalysis of this sort is offered.
The boundaries of “the work” in taiko are not always easily defined. My univer-
sity campus has a club called Senryu Taiko that is run and organized by students;
like many collegiate taiko groups in North America, they mostly create their own
repertoire, but they learned “Aranami” from Rev. Tom around 1998, when they
were still establishing themselves. When I saw them perform it in 2004, I didn’t
recognize it for a moment: the rhythmic patterns were “the same” as those I know
as “Aranami,” but the students had completely transformed the feeling of the work
by creating their own choreography for it. Senryu Taiko used two kata (first diago-
nal, then facing the chudaiko) and utilized the space around their chudaiko in
strikingly different ways than Satori Daiko, by shifting stances and deploying a
broader range of strokes, such as large sweeping strokes that crossed in front of the
body.10 The overall effect was extremely graceful and physically lyrical, unlike the
powerfully grounded and stationary effect of Rev. Tom’s minimal choreography.
The students always credit the “piece” as Rev. Tom’s (e.g., on concert programs),
but they perform it in ways that he never would have, that offer their own distinc-
tive interpretation.
“The work” is thus something flexible and potentially open to rearrangement
and rechoreographing, though in this case it retains its original attribution to
Rev. Tom. This comparatively open-ended approach to authorship attaches “the
work” to an originating individual, though it assumes a slightly different shape and
character in its bodily realization by another group. Such difference isn’t thought
of as mere ornamental detail laid over “the work” itself. I literally didn’t recognize
“the work” as “Aranami” for a long moment when I watched Senryu Taiko’s ver-
sion of it, despite the fact that “Aranami” is part of me, heart and soul, since I have
played it so many times over the years. I was disoriented for that long moment,
suspended in a jarring sense of knowing but not knowing. It sounded familiar, but
I didn’t know what it was because its bodily realization was so different.
But this “analysis” needs to go further. Kumi-daiko is literally a group experi-
ence—few of us ever play alone, except to practice—and that needs to be part of
any analysis. This is a tradition of massed drums, with no emic theory of how
many are too few or too many. I played “Aranami” with approximately one hun-
dred other taiko players in 1999 for the opening of the Pavilion of the Japanese
American National Museum in Los Angeles.11 The experience of the sound and
the experience of playing are meant to be multiple: many sounds, many perform-
ers. Satori Daiko has eighteen members, and we are used to a certain density of
sound. As in many amateur taiko groups, some but not all of us have “training” in
music, which means that we don’t all play with a metronomic sense of exactness
or subdivision, and we don’t play as a large group with an expectation of rhyth-
mic precision—whatever that might mean. Some of our members have extensive

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38    Looking, Listening, and Moving

Western art music training, and the group’s inexactness of attack and inability to
control tempos with any certainty are sources of frustration for them. In this com-
munity of performers a diversity of ability is a given, though not all participants
accept this with equanimity. Another way of putting it would be to say that the
amateur taiko scene does not discourage participation based on a lack of musical
training. It is assumed that playing makes you into a musician—not that you must
be a musician in order to play. Musical chops are recognized and admired, but
they are not the only criterion for being a “good” musician. Rev. Tom selected the
members of Satori Daiko from his many classes, and he said more than once that
solid playing ability in itself wasn’t the only or even the main thing that he looked
for: he chose students who had a good “attitude” as much as anything else, and that
attitude is the thing often referred to as “the taiko spirit,” a set of values that include
a lack of ego or arrogance, the ability to work well with others, the choice to put the
group before your own concerns, the will and desire to learn, and the motivation
to work hard. When we rehearse, we go over the matters that contribute to good
“ensemble” playing in other kinds of music (timing, choreography, dynamics, and
so on), but we also attend to spirit. We are used to hearing quite a bit of flamming:
we don’t all come down on downbeats together in any absolute sense. We have
limits to how much flamming we will tolerate for ourselves, but these limits are
not the same as those for studio musicians. The relationship between playing with
spirit and playing with metronomic exactitude has a wider envelope for us than
for some other traditions.12
Playing with a group of other people has deep bodily implications. We are
trained to look around us, at one another and at the audience; there is no notation
in which to bury our heads or eyes. You become used to the sensation of hearing
and feeling sound all around you. Taiko is invasive: a deaf musician could easily
become an accomplished taiko player through the bodily reception of sound vibra-
tions and visual cues. The shime or the kane (a small struck gong) cuts through the
mass of other sounds, so “listening” in taiko is both selective and involuntary: you
are subject to all the sounds around you but learn to focus on some over others.
But isn’t a lot of music making like that? What do performers in any tradi-
tion hear, and how are they brought or socialized into certain kinds of listening?
The multiplicity of sounds (notice that I am avoiding words like inexactness and
imprecision) that is so much a part of amateur taiko groups is hard to talk about
because taiko players are subject to the aesthetics of Western art music, which
neither values nor encourages messy playing. But the theory versus the practice
of taiko is an essential distinction, and the noise of messy, imprecise, unprofes-
sionalized playing is quintessentially part of the political aesthetics of taiko. In
flamming, I hear something besides an inability to subdivide: I hear the activation
of the body politic.
Taiko has been central to Japanese American and Asian American iden-
tity work since the 1970s. Taiko posits strength, discipline, organization, group
consciousness—the very things that define the Asian American Movement as a

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    39

political presence. Not coincidentally, Japanese/Asian Americans turned to taiko

during the decade when universities were creating ethnic studies programs and
when the Japanese American reparations movement was defined, articulated, and
operationalized (E. Yamamoto 2001). Taiko was part of an assertive new Asian
American sensibility, and it came to represent not only Sansei confidence but
also the political consciousness that being Japanese American is also being Asian
American and that the incarceration affected all Asian Americans. The pan-ethnic
gesture of “Asian American” is a coalitional grouping, not an erasure of history or
difference. The cover of William Wei’s important The Asian American Movement
(1993), for example, features a photograph of a taiko player at a demonstration
commemorating the death of Vincent Chin and protesting anti-Asian violence.13
Taiko became a metaphorical and an actual manifestation of the Japanese/Asian
American body politic, though the extent to which this is acknowledged or delib-
erately activated varies. Part of the power of the taiko body politic, I think, is the
dynamic difference between Japanese American and Asian American as separate
but interconstitutive and even overlapping identities. This is central to my own
interest in taiko and was manifested in some of the sites where we performed. In
April 2003, for instance, Satori Daiko played “Aranami” at the annual pilgrimage
to the site of one of the ten Japanese American incarceration camps: Manzanar, in
the high desert of central California. All these camps were in remote areas, and
few have any remaining structures; most are now barren expanses of rock, grass,
sand, and tumbleweed punctuated by the foundations of the barracks that housed
more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945. Since the 1970s—that
key period when Japanese Americans and Asian Americans got politically orga-
nized—former internees have arranged annual pilgrimages to these sites, keeping
memory alive and linking past and present civil liberties issues. The pilgrimages
always feature music, speeches, religious services at the camp cemeteries, testi-
mony from the now-elderly surviving internees, and more. They are a compel-
ling example of consciously created ritual. When Satori Daiko participated, we
spent a long morning in the sun and desert wind surrounded by others deter-
mined to remember—former internees, young Asian American activists, local
schoolchildren—listening to music and speeches and participating in an interde-
nominational religious service. We played “Aranami” with the snow-topped Sierra
Nevada behind us, the hot wind in our faces, and the stirring, sobering presence of
Manzanar’s ruins around us. (See video 13, Satori Daiko playing “Aranami” at the
Manzanar Pilgrimage, at http://wonglouderandfaster.com.)
What did “Aranami” mean in that context? One could riff on the programmatic
meaning of turbulent waves and the metaphoric connection to advocacy and resis-
tance, but these weren’t Rev. Tom’s original intent, nor were they brought up at the
time—the work is simply part of our core repertoire, you could say, and its non-
specific message of strength and power fit the bill. At another level, the sheer pres-
ence and sound of a taiko group—any taiko group—was the point, for all the met-
onymic reasons I have noted. At yet another level, we were there because Rev. Tom

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40    Looking, Listening, and Moving

had worked with the founders of the Manzanar Committee in the 1970s, when
he was drawn into the Asian American Movement and the Japanese American
reparations movement, so our presence in 2003 was an extension of his personal
history and his coming into political consciousness as a young Japanese Ameri-
can. Satori Daiko was one way that Rev. Tom participated in a body politic, and
therefore we did too. “Aranami” became part of a web of associations: First World /
Third World patterns of labor migration, the racialization of bodily economies,
and the surveillance of these economies. This aggregative process is the mecha-
nism behind political process: How do individuals draw together into formations?
How does an idea become shared? How does a movement become political action?
How is the body politic activated?
I now draw together the three parts of my argument into a methodology for
how music might be addressed. Musical sound is a bodily product; attending to
the body means taking experience seriously; experience is always individual but
implicates the collective. The production of musical sound through the body poli-
tic is the thing most worth getting at, it seems to me, and a few key ethnomusicolo-
gists have focused on this challenge at both the micro and the macro levels.
I focused above on the dynamic sound phenomenon of musicians playing
together in ways that draw on the sonic reality of multiple presences. Charles Keil
(1994) argues that imprecision is centrally part of the excitement of live musick-
ing: the micromoments of coming in and out of any exact or absolute conception
of downbeat or pitch are what make the music dynamic, vital, powerful, moving,
and simply interesting. He writes, “The power of music lies in its participatory dis­
crepancies,” and “Music, to be personally involving and socially valuable, must be
‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune’” (96). By focusing on the moments when things don’t
line up exactly, he identifies the “discrepancies” that make performance alive and
“participatory”; he prioritizes liveness, couching it in terms of a cultural “ecology”
of life, identity, and performance that is both compelling and oddly romantic (97).
Keil argues for peak experiences achieved through live performance with others,
whether while dancing a polka or listening to the blues, as moments when we
are “swept up,” full of “euphoric feelings,” and immersed in a “deeper and more
satisfying knowledge of who we are” (98).
The ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s (1982) expansive work on a Kaluli com-
munity in Papua New Guinea also situates sonic multiplicity as a principle. In
conversation with Keil (1994, 114), Feld posited the “lift-up-over-sounding” sonic
aesthetic of the Kaluli as a world view or, as he put it, a “spatial-acoustic meta-
phor” that becomes more broadly and deeply a model for perceiving the world
and relationships between everything in that world. The Kaluli most value musical
sound and conversational speech that is dense and overlapping, drawn from their
perception of the sonic and visual space of the Papua New Guinea rain forest.
In short, these two ethnomusicologists—who not coincidentally have worked
together closely over the years—have both focused on how sound relationships

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    41

map out the imbrication of aesthetics with everything else in a culture, from social
ecology to environmental ecology and beyond. Both suggest that sound relation-
ships matter, though always in locally specific ways. Both focus on how the sounds
don’t “line up,” as it were, and they find important and epistemologically essen-
tial meanings in those overlappings and discrepancies. This is not to say that all
musics everywhere contain their most profound meaning in mismatch and mis-
alignment14 but rather that the very terms of such values probably tell us—and the
people making them—something important. This is more than a reiteration of
homology models for music and culture.15 Musical sounds have a synergistic rela-
tionship with the body politic and with the supercultural and subcultural interac-
tions posited by Mark Slobin (1993). Sound and movement are realizations of the
body’s work as well as sites where the body is (re)formulated. The body in per-
formance does a lot at once: it moves in obedience to supercultural imperatives,
it recapitulates the terms of that obedience, it formulates the means for question-
ing and refusing those terms, and so on, and all this happens simultaneously. For
instance, the ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann (1996, 25) compares the work of the
body in the late capitalist First World to its placement in the laboring Third World
and argues that these locations outline different ways to understand “the work in
the work of art.” Which is emphasized, and which is most enabled: the agency of
the body’s work, or its control?
As the musicologist Christopher Small (1998, 213) puts it, any musical perfor-
mance articulates a “whole set of ideal relationships” between sounds and between
people. Small took a long look at the late twentieth-century phenomenon of West-
ern art music as a cultural construction, and he didn’t like what he saw. He reflected
on the practices defining the performance and reception of symphony concerts
and reluctantly concluded that they were “too hierarchical, too distant, and too
one-dimensional for [his] taste.” Arguing that the music we choose to make and
listen to tells us what kind of world we want to live in, he came to the painful
conclusion that the repertories which had been “a source of pleasure and satisfac-
tion since [his] earliest days” no longer worked for him—that they went “counter
to the way [he] believe[d] human relationships should be” (220). He insisted that
the question for anyone must then be “Who am I that I should go on wanting to
play and hear the works in this repertory?” As a young musician, I went through
the same process of immersion in and identity formation through Western art
music, and later, as an ethnomusicologist, I not only reached the same conclusion
as Small but went in search of musics that constructed different versions of social
reality and different models for ideal human relationships. As an Asian American
ethnomusicologist, I think taiko provides a compelling template for a social, cul-
tural, and musical reality that unambiguously emphasizes relational experience.
I realize that I still haven’t focused on sound. One could say that I have written
around it, circling around the thing itself, addressing the bodies producing the
sounds more than the sounds themselves. Working through “Aranami” has shown

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42    Looking, Listening, and Moving

me this: my own immersive experiences of the piece generated a pressing desire to

understand how and why it is so thrilling to make its sounds and hear them along-
side other people, both taiko players and audience members. Clearly, I am both
unable and unwilling to talk about the sounds “themselves” as isolatable or mean-
ingful. I have followed Small’s lead in finding that for taiko practitioners, perfor-
mance is more meaningful than composition, the experience of performance (and
not the “music itself ”) is foregrounded, and the embodiment/enactment of sound
creates affective, choreographic structures of meaning and effect that are just the
opposite of the objectified structures at the heart of traditional music analysis.
In sum, these are the matters that can be pursued through “analysis”: the pri-
mary values and the social vision driving the experience of music, whether hear-
ing or performing. That experience may or may not be euphoric or one of flow—it
may manifest in very different terms than those I described for taiko—but it will
certainly hinge on the shift in sensibility from the individual to the collective and
back again. I close with the sense that “Aranami” is and isn’t something that holds
still or something that allows analysis. It suggests that vestiges of the body and the
work of performance may be found in a piece of music, but such a piece might
better be regarded as a stopping-off point, a room with many doors. Attending to
the sonic means redefining the act of listening.

LOOKING #1

Look at the group of photos taken by one of my taiko friends (video 1, montage of
Gary St. Germain’s photos, at http://wonglouderandfaster.com). Gary St. Germain
and I—and about fifteen other amateur musicians, mostly Japanese American—
were in Satori Daiko together through most of the 2000s. Now in late middle age,
Gary is hapa haole (in his case half Japanese and half French Canadian). He is a
public school music teacher, a rock and roll drummer, and a very serious amateur
photographer. He has probably taken thousands of photos of Satori Daiko over the
years. I told him I wanted to feature some of his photos in this book, and I asked
him to send me around ten of his favorites. These are the ones he sent.
I looked at them and realized he hadn’t sent any photos of our group, so I asked
him if he could send some favorite photos of Satori Daiko in action, and he sent
the ones in video 2, montage of Gary St. Germain’s photos of Satori Daiko, at
http://wonglouderandfaster.com.
These are all striking and even accomplished photos. I’m not sure they offer the
story I want to tell about taiko, but I see a specific aesthetic at work in these images.
I have been perplexed for some time about how to take critically effective photos
of North American taiko, especially of my group. Documenting events in which
you are actively involved is a practical and a political challenge. Do I step out of the
action so I can capture it? Do I help serve food, carry equipment, talk with friends,
or do I step away so I can document other people doing those things? Do I put my
own sociality on standby or do I participate?

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    43

But I’ve been even more challenged by deeper matters. One can’t see taiko with-
out a lot of historical interference at work. I can’t see taiko without reenacting and
revitalizing other ways of seeing, including the colonial gaze and its contempo-
rary cousin, the multicultural gaze. It is impossible to do visual documentation of
any kind (still photography, video, etc.) without reenacting colonial and touristic
traditions of looking. I can’t see taiko. I am blind. I am frustrated because I am
at the mercy of inculcated ways of seeing that have colonized my ability to look.
Throughout this chapter, I mark this valence of seeing by italicizing it. This is the
act of looking that I want but can’t achieve. This is the ability to look at my friends
in a way that refutes everything framing us: it is an intervention of the most basic
kind, a willful act of performative perception that is at once unattainable and nec-
essary. I want to see taiko, and my friends playing taiko, in a way that reactivates
certain histories without being defined by them. I want to see the performance of
difference through taiko in ways that quickly acknowledge the problems (oriental-
ism, etc.) and then force an engagement with other narratives—other stories about
performance and alterity.
I want an ethnomusicology that moves restlessly between media and assumes
a translative shiftiness. This ethnomusicology takes performance more seriously
than we have allowed. Ethnomusicologists always come back to the text as the
ultimate medium of representation. We are excellent wordsmiths; we are adept
at talking around the thing itself; we know how to speak “for” it; and we even
know how to stop performance so that it can’t move around, so we can control the
moment and shape that we want to take in hand. We pay little attention to motion,
whether through time or space.
I don’t want to rehearse and retread and re-create the politics of display here.
Hundreds of books and articles have been written on these matters, mostly since
the 1980s, addressing the long reach of colonial surveillance and its contempo-
rary presence in images published by National Geographic, Kodak, and Benet-
ton. “Color” is a primary trope in these matters. Color is a literal value, in the
sense that the more colors are in a picture, or the brighter they are, the better.
Brighter and more colorful people enact a (social) aesthetic that positions variety
as visually pleasing and geopolitically comforting. Brightness and cheerfulness
are coterminous: clean, smiling, vivid people of color are fun to photograph, and
their smiles mean that they are happy to be photographed and happy to be taken
home in your camera. They are available, ownable, transportable, accessible. All
this is old news.

P IC T U R E S T HAT M OV E

The image must be compelled to speak. How does the photograph—this still, silent
object—become the thing itself? How can we choreograph it back into movement,
let alone into sound? We need to dance with it and engage with it as if it were a
partner in a duet.

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44    Looking, Listening, and Moving

Ethnomusicologists consistently use photographs in severely limited ways,

often to say little more than “I was there” or “Here’s an instrument. It has twenty-
two strings.” The work of Charles and Angeliki Keil (1992, 2002) stands out because
they combine music and photography, often working with the photographer Dick
Blau. I love Blau’s photos of American polka dancers and Roma musicians, and the
Keils’ grounded words about them. Text and image interact; neither is primary;
the frisson between the two is unexpected and stays with you beyond the page.
One of the few standard ethnomusicological monographs that pulls this off is
Steven Feld’s Sound and Sentiment (1982). Feld has experimented with audiovisual
media in any number of ways, often pushing the boundaries of accepted practice
and wisdom. He too is weighted down by heavy genealogies of “documentation,”
but he often turns this around and makes it work for him. Near the end of his book,
he inserts two color plates that do important critical work. First, he offers a standard
photo that gives the viewer the expected full, unobstructed view of a performer,
allowing us to take in and own every detail of the man’s costume. As Feld puts it,

The first image has a form that is frequent and conventional in ethnographies. We
assume that it represents someone doing what he normally does. With no further
information about who is represented here or what he is doing, it is easy to take
refuge in the structure of the image—conventional Western portraiture framed in a
medium shot—and to assume that this framing is a significant way to depict a Papua
New Guinean dressed in a ceremonial costume holding a drum. Further attention
can then be directed to the costume itself, the body painting, the red and white feath-
ers, and the palm leaf streamers.
It is clear, however, that these things are not the meaning of the image, nor is the
simple meta-message “the photographer was in Papua New Guinea and saw this cos-
tuming.” The image could have been made at any number of places, and we have no
other internal information to indicate the photographer participated in some event
for which the costume was made and used. (233–34)

Then you turn the page and see something extraordinarily different. Feld writes:
The second image is clearly not an attempt at iconic depiction, and only the deliber-
ateness of its presentation here might lead one to decide that it is intentional and not
a representation of incompetence. . . .
[It] was very premeditated. Two days before the event at which it was made, I
spent the day talking with Jubi and asked him to describe what was going to happen.
I wanted to get a sense of the anticipatory feelings that accompany the planning and
staging of ceremonies. At one point he remarked: “In the middle of the night, while
the dancers continue, dancing and dancing . . . you get tired and lie down . . . and
then, all of a sudden, something startles you, a sound, or something . . . you open
your eyes and look at the dancer . . . it is a man in the form of a bird.” I was taken
by this description of that hypnotic, tired, dreamy sensation promoted by a long
evening of song, as well as the implication that one is emotionally prepared to experi-
ence the ceremony in this way.

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    45

Jubi’s remark was the basis for the second photograph; I decided to use a meta-
phoric convention from my own culture’s expressive tradition in photography to
make a synthetic and analytic statement about a Kaluli metaphor. (234, 235–36)

Turning the page from the first image brings the viewer into another world: the
dancer is in motion, the photo is blurred, and the longhouse is dark. What might
have been discarded as a bad photo is instead one of the most stirring moments in
the book: the man becomes a bird before our eyes, dancing in the deep night. Feld
explains that this was the only time he stepped away from his “imaging behaviors
as an ethnographer” (1982, 236). He calls this attempt “co-aesthetic witnessing”
(236) and describes the photo as an encore to the rest of the book, though it also
forecasts his subsequent experiments with soundscape recordings and more. It is
an effort to see differently and to participate in an aesthetic by doing more than
just looking. The photo moves. The viewer (you or I) looks at the photo and sees
not only Feld’s shift in perspective but an invitation to see with.
Similarly, Louise Meintjes (2004, 176) uses a photograph to convey the
power of the kick in Zulu ngoma. In this extraordinary photo by T. J. Lemon,
the dancer Bafana Mdlalose is seen head on. His body fills the frame; a woman
behind him is blurrily out of focus, so our eyes are drawn to nothing but him.
His posture is impossible: at first you can’t make out how the parts of his body
can be where they are. His right foot is high above his head; the sole of his shoe
dominates the top left corner of the photo. He is grimacing, and his stare is
directed somewhere above the viewer’s head: Lemon caught him in the exact
moment of kicking his foot into the air, so his arms are down and his body is
powerfully contracted. He is shouting; we can see his teeth and the lines in his
forehead. We can’t help but admire the musculature of his shoulder, his left
arm, his left thigh, and the startling back of his right calf and hamstring. His
posture is powerfully unnatural. The focused energy of the move clearly comes
from the core of his body, but the photographer has deliberately left this dark,
shadowed—the energy comes from a place we can’t see. Mdlalose’s entire body
makes visible the physical effort of the kick—this key choreography of defiance.
Meintjes describes this moment:
Of the hardest hit they say in Zulu “inesigqi!” (It has power!). The hardest hit has
power. The voiced palatal ‘click’ -gqi is an aural icon of the thud of the foot hitting the
ground after a high frontal kick in the Zulu men’s dance styles called ngoma. After a
preparatory sequence, the dancer’s right knee bends, his back arches, his head tilts
back. He extends his right arm over his head as his left leg stretches back to prepare
for the pick-up to the beat. The forward thrust of his left arm balances his taut and
arching body. Then, as if a spring suddenly triggered, he kicks his left leg into the sky,
curls his torso and shoots his right arm forward to balance his one-legged stance. His
skyward foot thunders down onto the ground on the beat, gqi! Dust flies. He throws
away the movement with his hands, in the recoil of his torso, with a flick of his head,
and he saunters off. (174)

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46    Looking, Listening, and Moving

The relationship between the photo and Meintjes’s vivid paragraph isn’t clear.
Is she describing this dancer, or is her description generic and the photograph
an apt but nonspecific example of such a “high frontal kick”? Her purpose is to
reintegrate sound, the body, and politics, and her justly famous article offers a
compelling model. She unpacks how ngoma generates “that sense of total dense
consolidation” of collective song, dance, and purpose (180). She articulates “the
absolutely dialogic relation between the kinetic body and the sound as two expres-
sive elements that collectively compose the form” of ngoma (184), and the similari-
ties with taiko are strong.
Coaesthetic witnessing is a critical move that means the ethnographer has
made an ontological commitment to try to see, which probably means feeling,
knowing, listening, carrying things, and more. I aim to leave the documentary
impulse behind and move instead to enact core values in every frozen moment.
This is a shift in intent and position; this is a performative commitment.

HOW I D O N ’ T WA N T T O L O O K AT TA I KO

capture
take
shoot
snap
freeze

Photographs of performance are so predictable. It’s as if photographers think

they’ve been granted automatic access to people’s souls and, worse, have already
decided what (they think) they know about those souls before taking the picture.
There are an impressive number of clichéd ways to look at taiko and to capture
it. Most performance traditions have clichéd photographic expectations. The jazz
sax player, always a cisgender man, is always captured blowing out a high note
with his eyes squeezed shut. This is supposed to tell us that he is full of emotion,
that he is putting “everything” into it, that body and soul are one and the same (a
trope mapped onto any music with African American roots), that he is so deeply
into the music that everything else has vanished, and so on. Classical pianists are
photographed hunched intensely over the keys or in transport, with their head
thrown back and eyes closed; they are never, ever, ever photographed smiling
while they play.
Stereotyped ways to depict taiko players are clichés because they enact and
maintain certain narratives about the tradition. The odaiko is generally the larg-
est kind of drum in a taiko ensemble and is deeply connected to specific ideas
about masculinity, strength, and authority. I write about these matters at great
length in chapter 5, but here it suffices to say that men are far more likely to play

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    47

virtuosic odaiko solos than women. Gendered ability is never “natural,” though it
certainly takes considerable upper-body strength to play above shoulder level. No
rules decree that men should play the odaiko more than women; rather, a series of
historically specific practices have hardened the gender associations between men
and the odaiko, particularly the spectacular solos played on odaiko by members of
the Japanese taiko groups Ondekoza and Kodo. As a result, playing lengthy virtuo-
sic solos on this instrument is at once a sign of strength, stamina, gendered author-
ity, and cultural authenticity. Following from that, many taiko players, especially
men who want to be known for their abilities as soloists or as master teachers,
tend to have their photographs taken at the odaiko, often from behind. They often
display quite a bit of skin as well, partly in homage to Kodo but also to show off
musculature. This kind of photograph thus tells a story about mastery, discipline,
and roots: this stereotypical image depicts a body grounded in the most authentic
practices . . . even when it’s a woman doing it. When a woman is inserted into
this generic taiko photograph (and she can be only an insertion, not an authentic
presence), she is understood to aspire to the kind of fame and regard normally
reserved for men in this tradition, especially in Japan. A few women—especially
Tiffany Tamaribuchi—have effectively redirected and even disrupted this iconic
image, but only by first evoking it (Ahlgren 2008). In short, this kind of photo-
graph is endlessly restaged and reshot because it tells a story that certain people
want and need. Some of those people are taiko players. Others are not, and they
want to capture or consume an idea of taiko reflecting their need for particular
kinds of authenticity or authority.

L O O K I N G # 2 : W H Y I T ’ S HA R D T O P HO T O G R A P H
JA PA N E SE A M E R IC A N S

As Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (2012, xiii) writes, the “dark trope in American history”
is that “racializing objectification erases subjectivity.” Asian Americans simply
aren’t seen, and when we are, the refracting lens of racialized logic ensures that
something else comes into focus and our subjectivity vanishes. The exuberant
visuality of taiko is necessarily, inevitably, and disquietingly in permanent nego-
tiation with this dynamic. Many of my taiko friends are Japanese Americans who
have lived in Southern California for much if not all of their lives. Their families
are mostly from this area, and they are rooted in an extensive Japanese American
community that stretches across some four generations and the sprawling suburbs
of greater Los Angeles. Two degrees of separation is the most that anyone seems to
have from anyone else. This extended community is framed by the historical fact
of the Japanese American incarceration. Almost everyone has relatives who were
interned; one member of Satori Daiko was born in an incarceration camp. The
incarceration is a mostly unspoken but defining presence.

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48    Looking, Listening, and Moving

The incarceration camps were photographed in specific ways by specific pho-

tographers, and a small body of fine scholarship has emerged on this, particularly
the work of Elena Tajima Creef. Ansel Adams’s and Dorothea Lange’s photographs
offer contrasting approaches to looking at the incarceration, both critical but pro-
foundly different from each other. Adams created aestheticized portraits of heroic
American citizens, often in carefully composed arrangements of line and light.
Lange went for messier images of drudgery and the weary work of incarceration.
Both photographers assembled gripping bodies of documentation, each infused
with certain political sensibilities—Adams’s assertion of the “good” Japanese
American citizen, Lange’s thinly contained sense of outrage—but neither corpus
can be described as coaesthetic witnessing. Both photographers were profoundly
manipulative. Providing a political critique involved aestheticizing Japanese
Americans in ways that are now part of my ability to see and to know. As Susan
Sontag (2003, 76) wrote, “Transforming is what art does, but photography that
bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems
‘aesthetic’; that is, too much like art.” These beautiful black-and-white images of
the emblematic wound to Japanese America are centrally part of what I see when
I look at taiko.
Fast-forward fifty years to the present, through the civil rights era and the Japa-
nese American fight for reparations. The problem of the incarceration has been
solved and the predominant narrative in SoCal is multiculturalism and the cel-
ebration of difference. Multicultural festivals punctuate the landscape like bright
smorgasbords, colorful and tasty and fun to see. Satori Daiko plays at festival after
festival, in city parks, in blocked-off streets, in parking lots. My hard drive is full
of the same photograph taken over and over again: we’re on a stage, playing for an
audience sitting in folding chairs or passing by with children in strollers and dogs
on leashes, eating hot dogs or funnel cake. Everyone’s having a good time. The
sun is out. The same banner is behind us on stage, saying that we’re in Gardena or
Monterey Park or Ventura and that the festival’s sponsor is Budweiser or Target or
WalMart. The group waiting to come on is a Brazilian samba troupe or Chinese
ribbon dancers or a local rock band. We’re playing our hearts out, but it’s the same
photograph: We’re part of a story that’s being told about us. No, we’re telling that
story ourselves, whether or not we meant to.
I can’t reconcile these images. I look at these pictures and I realize all over again
that I can’t see—I’m looking through someone else’s eyes, like in those sci-fi stories
where the protagonist has been transported into someone else’s body. I don’t want
to be in this body. I want to be able to see in my own ways.

T H R E E WAYS O F L O O K I N G AT TA I KO

In his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens offers this
final way of looking:

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    49

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Time is suspended. Things are happening and are anticipated. A dark, vital pres-
ence punctuates this: the blackbird has a marked stillness and is a defining refer-
ence. The blackbird is to time and snow what a photograph could be to perfor-
mance. It immobilizes the ephemeral things that are so beautiful and so important,
but without judgment, violence, or desire. It is a cipher, but it allows time and
action to continue to move, flow, and stir us.
Let me offer three ways of deploying still photography to learn something about
taiko. I want to use photography to learn about taiko, ethnomusicology, ethnog-
raphy, and difference all at the same time. I want to get beyond “I was there” and
“This is what the musical instrument looks like.” I want photography not to be
self-evident. I want it to be more than an extratextual way of saying the same thing
as the text. I want it to require conversation (both speaking and listening). I want
looking, feeling, and understanding to be pushed into a circle of interconstitu-
tive effort, through the text, through a cross-media circuit of translative exchange
between the writer and the reader. It’s meant to be a mutual effort in the way that
a good conversation is shared work and shared play. Here are the three ways of
looking at taiko:
1. This is what that moment feels like.
2. This is how that moment opens up.
3. This is how these moments come together.
I’ll start with #1. If we really want photography to “capture” a moment, then we
should put more thought into why some moments are worth capturing or are
(in)appropriate to capture and why the temporal gesture of freezing/capturing/
slowing/objectifying the ephemeral motions of performance is something worth
doing. I have already addressed the problem of aestheticizing through the act of
stopping and the kinds of beautiful violence wrought by the unitary eye.
The photo in figure 3 (Taiko Center of Los Angeles members playing “Amano,”
1998, at http://wonglouderandfaster.com) was taken about a year after I started
playing taiko; I don’t remember who took it. It’s been used countless times as a PR
photo for the Taiko Center of Los Angeles. It catches us in a particular moment
in a piece called “Amano,” short for “Amanojaku,” which is associated with a taiko
group based in Tokyo. It isn’t literally programmatic—we’re not pretending to
be amanojaku, the little demons who can convince people to act on their worst
desires—but it uses some rhythms from Kabuki and has a dramatic choreography,

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50    Looking, Listening, and Moving

seen here. The central phrase stops in the middle with a one-beat rest in which the
taiko players freeze with their arms in the air. This is what that moment feels like: if
you do it right, you use your entire body to push your arms into the air above your
head, working up from the hara, drawing on the rootedness of your thighs and feet
in basic kata position. You can do this only if you allow yourself to be relaxed and
flexible, if you allow your entire body to move in a quick flow of related parts. You
should think of your arms, hands, and bachi as arriving at a certain point—that is,
you need to envision a point of arrival, with your bachi in a slight V so that they
stop at dynamic point where they’re about ten inches apart at the tips but feel as
if there’s electricity crackling between them. You STOP there, for a long second:
everything should arrive and STOP. This is pure ma, an empty dynamic space
that gives meaning to everything around it. Then you pull your arms down for six
eighth notes—DORO-tsuku-DORO—and then repeat the gesture, thrusting your
arms UP. When you arrive at that moment with your arms in the air, you can shout
Ho! if you like, to punctuate it, to fill it, to help define the exact point of arrival.
The now-forgotten photographer caught me at that moment. I didn’t achieve the
right combination of flexibility and arrival every single time. “Aranami” is an aero-
bic piece to play, and sometimes I tired toward the end as the tempo sped up and it
became harder to catch the moment just so. But this photo shows me arriving at ma
perfectly. By perfectly I mean that my kata looks right, but I’m really saying that you
can tell I got it from the look on my face as much as from my actual form, which
is literally perfect (said in all humility—this was not always the case). On the left,
Janet Anwyl didn’t quite get it—look, the bachi in her right hand is still cocked, so
she didn’t think of pushing up using the ends of her bachi like arrows. On my other
side, Irene Ogata got there but is trying too hard: look at how her shoulders are
hunched up—you can see how stiff she is and how she’s forced the movement rather
than pushing up from the core. It’s in her face too: she has a kind of blank, frozen
stare that shows she’s all inside her head, thinking too hard rather than directing
her ki outward. I can tell you all this because I’ve been there and done that.
This is how that moment opens up. Any moment is set within many other
moments, some of them side by side, others far away in space and time. Let me
turn to another photo: figure 4, Audrey Nakasone airborne, at http://wonglou-
derandfaster.com. This isn’t a great picture, but I love it because of the series of
moments it offers. This is Audrey Nakasone, formerly a member of Satori Daiko.
I miss her. It all ended in fraught ways, as it sometimes does in music ensembles
when people care deeply about what they’re doing and the terms on which they
come together to do it. In short, she left the group, and it took us more than a year
to get things back on track. She wasn’t a trained musician, so her sense of rhythm
wasn’t perfect, but she had more ki than anyone else I’ve ever played with. She had
already been playing for about ten years when I first started, so I looked to her as
an authority, though she wasn’t officially our teacher. Rev. Tom was our teacher
and director, but Audrey was nonetheless completely in charge of our group. If she

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    51

said “Get in line,” we got in line. Sometimes this made me feel browbeaten and
infantilized, but I still got in line, because she knew what she was doing.
This photo shows her jumping while playing, and it exemplifies her tremendous
ki and her ability to channel it. It reminds me of how much fun it was to play beside
her: she was always, always directed outward, and completely in the moment, and
aware of whoever she was playing with. She was a tyrant, but she was also one of
the most generous musicians with whom I’ve ever played. With some of my taiko
pals, I feel as if they’re waiting for me to do something wrong, but Audrey had the
ability to pull the best playing out of each of us by connecting. Playing with some
of my taiko friends feels like being bullied: they push the tempo on purpose and
simply expect everyone to follow, for instance. Audrey sometimes bullied me with
words, but only in rehearsals, and when we played together she created a positive
connection that drew the best out of me and pulled me up to the next level.
When I teach fieldwork courses, I often ask my students to write an essay about
one of their research photos, to get them out of show-and-tell mode. A picture
isn’t worth a thousand words: it will tell you only as much as you demand of it,
and if you demand only that it retell old stories, then that’s all it will do. John and
Malcolm Collier (1992, 99–115) suggest several ways to treat photography as a kind
of social action and interaction. For instance, they encourage anthropologists to
use photographs in interviews—that is, the researcher and the researched should
literally look at photographs together and thus disrupt the interviewer-interviewee
binary—to prompt people to talk about themselves, their environment, and the
things most meaningful to them. As the Colliers put it, this shifts the very terms
of the relationship, by asking people to be “expert guides” rather than “the sub-
ject of the interrogation” (106). It also resituates meaning from the image back
into the person looking at it. Photographs aren’t self-contained: they aren’t objects
complete unto themselves, though a heavy history of aestheticized assumptions
encourages this idea. They demand to be read, and my reading of this photograph
includes attention to the relationship I had with Audrey, to sadness over a friend-
ship lost, to a discussion of what ki is and how it works, to the dynamics of peda-
gogy and learning.

M OV I N G : T H I S I S HOW T H E SE M OM E N T S
C OM E T O G E T H E R

We shouldn’t expect photographs to stand alone. After all, the stand-alone photo-
graph is basically a throwback to art history and the odd ways that the practice of
aestheticized photography has been wed to the history of painting: early photogra-
phers often evoked the moves and expectations of painterly praxis, including the
expectation that “an” image should have the legs to stand on its own, alone, as an
isolated moment. Why should that be? The image is a moment extracted from many
moments. So maybe we shouldn’t force it to be a single moment. Instead, let me

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52    Looking, Listening, and Moving

show you an afternoon—the long, beautiful afternoon of August 4, 2007, at Gardena

Buddhist Church, a Japanese American temple in California. I share that afternoon
with you to explain why taiko players need to know how to do bon-odori, the group
dances that are part of the Obon ritual. I use photography to try to show you what it
was like, on that afternoon, for this taiko player to dance and dance and dance. I will
need to show you quite a few photographs, and most aren’t Kodak moments—they
aren’t perfectly composed or balanced or even memorable. But why should we insist
that any of them be so? Instead, I suggest that looking at this series of photographs
will teach you what it was like, on that afternoon, to be a taiko player who went to
participate in bon-odori to move through what some Japanese Americans say is the
heart of Japanese American taiko, even though you are moving to taiko rather than
playing it. I don’t yet want to give you an encyclopedia definition of Obon or bon-
odori. Both are touchstones throughout this book. Suffice it to say that these dances
are both new and old, that they are always done in unison, and that it doesn’t mat-
ter whether the people who dance them are good or not: the point is to participate.
Obon is a kind of unintentional corrective to the SoCal multicultural festival. I don’t
offer it as more authentic; rather, it reflects the reality of existing Japanese American
communities that are here, now, despite incarceration, despite out-marriage, despite
the fact that the suburbs are the new Japantowns. Obon interfaces with the multicul-
tural festival but is its vital cousin, reminding us that community is sometimes quite
real and coherent and doesn’t need to be stage-managed.
The dances are scheduled at the end the day, after you have presumably been
at the temple for a while, probably watching and listening to taiko performances
and buying and eating teriyaki, dango, spam musubi, gyoza, or shaved ice. It’s five
o’clock, and people are gravitating toward the side street that’s been closed to traf-
fic, where white lines have been chalked onto the asphalt, concentric ovals a block
long. If you’re a kid, you went bobbing for goldfish and are probably carrying one
around in a clear plastic bag. You’ve checked out the farmers’ market. If you’re a
member of the temple’s Buddhist Women’s Association, you’ve been in high gear
for several days and are now working at a food stall. If you’re a member of the
temple, you’ve been running into acquaintances and chatting.
Participating in an event often means looking at the backs of people’s heads.
Dancing means you’re in motion and can’t make the moments into a single
moment. Participating means taking “bad” pictures—photographs that are blurry,
unbalanced, cluttered, unposed. Coaesthetic witnessing forces a willingness to
discard the aestheticized terms of good photography once and for all. You—the
reader—must flip through these photos in a suspended act of waiting to dance (see
video 3, montage of Obon and bon-odori at Gardena Buddhist Church, August 4,
2007, at http://wonglouderandfaster.com). Most were taken between dances. Each
dance lasted about five minutes and the entire event about two hours. In between
dances, things stopped for three or four minutes while a new drummer climbed up
into the yagura or the MC made sure the right CD was in the PA system. Everyone

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 Looking, Listening, and Moving    53

waited, still on the white lines. We chatted with one another. People came into
or went out of the dance circle. That’s when I took pictures. There are no photo-
graphs here of dancing (because I was dancing), save one near the beginning of
the sequence. The woman in it stands with her hands folded in prayer, slightly to
the left of the white chalk line in the street. She and her dance companions wear
matching white happi coats with red borders—they’re all from the same temple.
Her face is solemn; her expression suggests something internal. She’s praying, or
rather, her face and her hands and her stance all say that this is “Bon-odori Uta,”
the dance done at the beginning and again at the very end of the evening. The
dance is prayer, stately and a bit slow, with the hands in and out of gassho: they
weave and sway, pantomiming a fish swimming. Gassho is several things at once:
the gesture of putting the hands together in prayer, a greeting, an expression of
ritual understanding that a Buddhist frame has been created, reverence. My pho-
tograph shows the woman in prayer—her hands, her face, her body, her place in
a line of people doing the same thing. It’s a “good” photo. But its presence here
means I wasn’t in gassho, which isn’t good at all.

M OV I N G T H R OU G H T H E I M AG E

Documenting Japanese American drumming demands a new kind of visual eth-

nomusicology. I have offered a series of moves that folds the history of the colonial
gaze into a mindful practice of seeing. It is impossible to do visual documentation
of any kind without reenacting colonial and touristic traditions of looking. These
acts of looking are unavoidably part of the way the way that we see and thus part of
the way that anyone—including taiko players themselves—is forced to “see” taiko.
I offer an unbeautiful, uncelebratory visual ethnomusicology that acknowledges
the guiding, spectacularized effects of colonial surveillance on our ability to see yet
deploys visual technologies to try to get inside the performance of alterity from the
viewpoint of a participant. I thus offer a willfully conflicted yet mindful attempt to
document taiko as an intervention in those economies.
Reaching for a time-out-of-time is perhaps necessary here. The defining gaze
can’t be undone, it seems. As Rey Chow (1993, 51) puts it, “Because [the] ‘originary’
witnessing is, temporally speaking, lost forever, the native’s defiled image must
act both as ‘image’ (history of her degradation) and as that witnessing gaze.” The
moment before being seen retreats and retreats. My book doesn’t stand silently on
the page: it shudders and blinks and jumps. I hope it pushes at how ethnomusicol-
ogy has depended on critical moves that limit how we are able to think about per-
formance—that is, how we are able to see performance, and thus to see the serious
cultural work that performance does. I dance with the camera. Sometimes it’s in
my pocket and sometimes it’s in my hand. My I/eye has many fields of vision. I am
trying to see more than I can ever, really, see—yet the effort itself is the performa-
tive task that begs to be attempted.

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