With its dynamic choreographies and booming drumbeats, taiko has gained worldwide popularity since its emergence in 1950s Japan. Harnessed by Japanese Americans in the late 1960s, taiko’s sonic largesse and buoyant energy challenged stereotypical images of Asians in America as either model minorities or sinister foreigners. While the majority of North American taiko players are Asian American, more than four hundred groups now exist across the United States and Canada, and these groups are comprised of people from a variety of racial and ethnic identities. Using ethnographic and historical approaches combined with performance description and analysis, this book explores the connections between taiko and Asian American cultural politics at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Based on original and archival interviews, as well as the author’s extensive experience as a taiko player, this book highlights not only the West Coast but also the Midwest as a site for Asian American cultural production and makes embodied experience central to inquiries about identity. The book builds on insights from the fields of dance studies, ethnomusicology, performance studies, and Asian American studies to argue that taiko players from a variety of identity positions “perform Asian America” on stage, as well as in rehearsals, festivals, and schools and through interactions with audiences. While many taiko drummers play simply for the love of the form’s dynamism and physicality, this book demonstrates that politics is built into even the most mundane aspects of rehearsing and performing.
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