The Way
of Taiko
by Heidi Varian; Foreword by Seichi Tanaka
Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA USA,2005
128 pp., illus. 60 col. Paper, $18.95
ISBN: 1-880656-99-X.
JRock,
Ink: A Concise Report on 40 of the Biggest
Rock Acts in Japan
by Josephine Yun; Yana Moskaluk, illustrator
Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA USA,
2005
128 pp., illus. 40 col., Paper, $18.95
ISBN: 1-880656-95-7.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University
Center MI 48710 USA
mosher@svsu.edu
A Western stereotype of Japanese music
is that of delicate plucked notes of a
stringed koto, quiet and contemplative
enough to accompany the ceremonial serving
of tea. These two books engage other Japanese
musics, one rooted in venerable, muscular
tradition and the other the cream of their
frothy, ephemeral, postmodernist Pop.
Taiko is drum music whose roots include
Shinto's sacred kagura music and accompaniment
to the gigaku drama of the royal court.
It was invigorated in the late twentieth
century when the Japanese government recognized
and protected traditional arts. Taiko
in the United States began in Northern
California when Seiichi Tanaka founded
Taiko Dojo troupe in San Francisco, California,
a diverse city where community arts are
celebrated and recognized. He began drumming
at the Japantown neighborhood's 1968 Cherry
Blossom Festival. This reviewer met Tanaka
at an antiwar march in 1982 that included
many Japanese-Americans troubled by the
proliferation of nuclear missiles, and
was impressed by his sincerity and commitment
as an artist to the well being of the
world.
An hour to the south, San José,
California, had its own taiko troupe by
1973. First seen by this reviewer about
a decade later in a televised appearance,
it was hard to take one's eyes off of
PJ Hirabayashi and the other women in
the troupe, drumming fiercely. Author
Heidi Varian is a drummer herself and
has been a member of Taiko Dojo. Evidently
some taiko drummers bemoan the encountering
of non-Japanese influences that might
"water down" the genre. They want to see
committed drummers maintaining traditional
discipline and moral purity. Yet the flexible
and shifting edges of taiko are revealed
when Varian writes how "[e]veryone in
my family plays taiko. I am Icelandic,
my husband Aztec, and we are often asked
why we play Japanese drums."
The elegant, compact book covers the range
of daiko (drums), various narimono percussion
instruments, and even the flutes and stringed
gakki that might appear alongside the
assertive drums. There is a discussion
of regalia and costume, an introduction
to various philosophical aspects of the
taiko drummer's art, and a glossary.
From the same publisher comes JRock,
Ink, capsule biographies of Japanese
rock musicians by Josephine Yun, an American
devotee of Japanese rock music, and editor
of www.jrockonline.com . Now, what's that
jazz player's quote about how writing
about music is like dancing about architecture?
Giving us a chatty, serviceable history,
Yun is both as informative and maddeningly
subjective as the late Lester Bangs. She
files journalistic constructs that pique
the reader's curiosity, like how BUCK-TICK's
"unhappy, dirty music" is "the musical
equivalent of exploded soot and smoke."
If not always illuminating, it makes for
a fun, frisky read. Or perhaps the text
is only an armature around the pictures.
Yana Moskaluk, an illustrator in Atemy
Lebedev's Moscow studio, gives us her
visions, well-situated by designer Yelena
Zhavornkova <www.untitled.ws>. In
the manner of Alan Aldridge's Beatles
Illustrated Lyrics or Frank Olinsky's
What the Songs Look Like (1987),
limning Talking Heads' lyrics, the pictures
are delightfully imagined, sometimes irrelevant
and noncommunicative but groovy. I would
have liked to have glimpsed the Bic pen
drawings covering Yana Moskaluk's notebooks
in junior high school.
This reviewer very much likes the privileging
of subjective drawings, the celebration
of an artist's sensibility and freedom
from expectations of photographic realism.
Yet clearly not all Japanese rockers,
especially those with long careers, look
like teenyboppers; Puffy AmiYumi (not
in the book) are playing in Detroit this
month, and one sees from the photo on
the advertisement they look like the Japanese
women in their forties that they are.
Moskaluk's pop stars are all enjoyably
sexy and nubile, poutingly sensuous and
swirly, fashionable and fey. One thinks
of the highly decorative Diaghilev-era
Russian artists like Nicholas Roerich,
Leon Bakst and Erté (Roman de Tiroff).
Many J-Rock bands continue the Glam (or
for them, Kabuki theater) tradition of
young men in cosmetics and feminine garments.
Whereas most often drag in the west consists
of gay men embodying the tragic or perfomative
sexuality of female show biz divas, what
is normally noticeable in heterosexual
Glam Rockers is the tension between their
masculine aspects (shoulders, necks, five
o' clock stubble) and feminine costume.
This was obvious in Bob Gruen's DVD "All
Dolled Up", documenting the New York Dolls
of the 1970s. In JRock, Ink, Yana Moskaluk's
illustrations leach the defiant masculinity
from all these mascara'd music men, leaving
their visages and lithe frames doll-like,
glamorous and girly. However suspect,
this is the illustrator's prerogative.
It is as if Aubrey Beardsley had been
commissioned to depict Notable Personages
of 1896 for the London Illustrated
News, or Paul Klee drew faculty portraits
for the Bauhaus yearbook. Whether Moskaluk
was provided CDs and magazine photos of
the bands by author Yun or not, the drawings
are exercises is style, not documentation.
As someone with a cartoon-illustrated
rock book of my own from a Japanese publisher
(Shohakusha, 2005), I'm OK with that.
My only complaint about this confection,
I mean, book JRock, Ink? On the
last page of The Way of Taiko we
learn that a DVD is available from Stone
Bridge that shows Tanaka, his son and
grandson playing Taiko with their troupes.
It would be rewarding if a similar DVD
could be prepared by Stone Bridge, based
on JRock, Ink, with videos of all
the bands discussed. If not, an audio
CD would be very welcome. What author
Yun has told us, and what she and illustrator
Moskaluk have consciously left out, makes
this reader anxious to hear and see more.