Angry Drummers: A Taiko Group from Naniwa, Osaka, Japan (review)

This fine documentary by ethnomusicologist Terada is a milestone in the scholarship on taiko. Terada's film addresses one kumi-daiko community group in Osaka, and the issues he presents challenge the origin myths often preferred by twenty-first-century taiko players.¹

Terada is an American-trained Japanese ethnomusicologist at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan (Minpaku) and a specialist in the music of minorities. His extensive research on Okinawans in Osaka resulted in Drumming Out a Message: Eisa and the Okinawan Diaspora in Japan (2009), an excellent documentary that, like Angry Drummers: A Taiko Group from Naniwa, Osaka, Japan, explores the many ways that traditional percussion addresses minoritarian presence in a Japan that still sometimes tries to imagine itself as homogeneous. Angry Drummers focuses squarely on a key absence from most taiko histories. Taiko were made for centuries in Japan by the burakumin, the low-status caste of untouchables who labored as butchers and leatherworkers. Tainted by the ritual impurity of killing animals, buraku were both needed for their work and held at arm's length by Shinto/Buddhist Japanese society. The buraku are sometimes described as an ethnic group and sometimes as a caste or class. While buraku look ethnically Japanese, their family names are usually a clear marker of their identity and few non-buraku Japanese are willing to marry them. The burakumin are thus an internal minority and have struggled for centuries against discrimination. In the late twentieth century, some began to use a human rights framework to call for social equity and acceptance. Ikari Taiko, the community ensemble featured in Angry Drummers, is in the middle of this struggle. Indeed, one could say that they have played a key role in articulating a new kind of buraku presence—loud, assertive, and determined.²

Although the large drums known as taiko have been central to Shinto and Buddhist ritual in Japan for several thousand years, kumi-daiko—the contemporary tradition of taiko ensembles featuring multiple drums—is a post-World War II phenomenon. It is simultaneously traditional, contemporary, and thoroughly folkloricized. Its energy and sheer intensity is irresistible to audiences all over the world, and its explosive global presence as an intercultural roots music is remarkable. It emerged in the 1950s in Japan, was picked up by Asian Americans on the West Coast of the United States and Canada in the late 1960s, was central to Japanese American community-building in the 1970s-1980s, and by the 2000s new taiko groups were literally springing up everywhere in North America.³ Taiko groups are also well-established in Western Europe and the Latin American Japanese diaspora. Most taiko groups are amateur but a few are professional.

Angry Drummers focuses on the story of one taiko group. Terada tells their story through extended interview footage shot in Osaka from 2006 to 2010. The documentary features only sparing amounts of the usual high-voltage performance footage of taiko players shouting and sweating. Instead, Terada focuses on 15 individual members of Ikari Taiko, seen sitting quietly in the offices and exhibits at the Naniwa Human Rights Cultural Center in Osaka as they talk to the camera.⁴ The overall feeling of the documentary is dignified and reflective. Interviewees are featured in extended sequences, allowing them to talk at length in Japanese, with English subtitles. Background information is provided through on-screen text, not through narration. Occasional still photographs (e.g., the Naniwa children's taiko group in 1986) provide historical background.

The first part of the documentary, "The Beginning," focuses on the Naniwa community members who decided to play taiko. As an Okinawan taiko player puts it, Naniwa was known for taiko-making but not for taiko players, and this is surprising for outsiders who might expect the two to...