Portland Taiko – Oregon Lost & Found

Something was going to inspire me to finally write in this blog again after months of making excuses to myself.

I’ve just come back from Portland Taiko’s culminating show of the season, Oregon Lost & Found. I often catch myself overusing the word “awesome” (my California upbringing, maybe?), but Portland Taiko is, in the true sense of the word, awesome. Sometimes tears well up in my eyes when I see a really good live performance, not for any particular nameable emotion, but just because I feel so swept off my feet I feel like I’m somehow inside the performance. This was one of those times.

This show featured Ann Ishimaru and Zack Semke, founding Portland Taiko members who had left the group but is back to perform for the 15th anniversary season. They’d left before I was introduced to the group, so I wasn’t familiar with them before. According to the program notes “a past PT favorite,” they did an impressive duet using five drums between the two of them.

In general, the show was full of clever conceits, some I’d seen them do before, others I hadn’t. Relatively new performing member Keiko Araki, whose day job is as a violinist for the Oregon Symphony, continues to lend her string skills in addition to her taiko-playing, which is an interesting and welcome addition to the Portland Taiko repertoire. Michelle Fujii and Toru Watanabe have apparently been doing a lot of sharing of their dance background with the others, as there were even more choreography and visuals than usual. Guest artist Rick Bartow, a Native American artist, did a painting on stage. There was storytelling and acting. There were costumes and props. There was singing. There was humor. They made instruments of phone books, a tire, bamboo, and paper. Yes, plain pieces of paper — which for me, being a lover of musicals, reminded me a bit of Gene Kelly tap-dancing with a newspaper in Summer Stock.

All this might seem gimmicky if it weren’t so perfectly executed, with the rare combination of wild-abandon earnestness and confident gracefulness. Above all, what really comes through and makes them extraordinary is personality. The major innovation in the history of contemporary taiko is when jazz drummer Daihachi Oguchi decided that it would be a good idea to combine multiple taiko drums to form an ensemble. Portland Taiko really embraces this seemingly basic concept when they write and perform pieces that force the players to act as a team, giving us wonderful rhythms that syncopate, start, stop, merge, complement, divide, give, and take, each part doing something different but contributing to the whole to create a single song.

People who know me well know that I like rhythm, and I also like the loud, exuberant, and big. Portland Taiko emanates energy and joy. I feel so grateful to have become acquainted with you — thank you so much, Portland Taiko!

Check them out on their website: http://www.portlandtaiko.org/

Stubborn Twig and Mochitsuki

It’s been quite a week for Japanese-American culture in Portland.

On January 15th, I went to a reading/talk by Lauren Kessler, the local author of Stubborn Twig, the selection for the Oregon Reads 2009 program. The idea is that people across the state will read this book over the next several months. Because of the subject matter — “Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family,” the book cover says — I’d decided I better participate in this program and had picked up the book earlier in the week (with a Barnes&Noble gift certificate that was gathering dust!).

Lauren Kessler proved to be charming and smart. She read some passages from the book, yes, but she went beyond what most authors do at these readings and took some time to just talk, about the members of the Yasui family who are the subject of her book, about the immigrant experience, and about what it means to be an American. To be honest, I started out slightly skeptical of a white author writing about a Japanese-American family, but that seems to have been a result of my own prejudice. It’s obvious that Lauren Kessler, this woman of third-generation European descent, fully immersed herself into all aspects of this book, cares about the Yasui family and others like them, and has given a lot of deep thought into the nature of this Nation of Immigrants.

Over and over, I found myself mentally nodding at what she was saying. To grossly paraphrase, she talked about how America is a “patchwork quilt” and not a “melting pot,” that we can celebrate our differences and not become all the same while still being a cohesive unit, how there are some aspects to the immigrant experience that are universal no matter where you came from, and yet how in other ways things are different for a descendant of a Japanese immigrant versus a descendant of a European immigrant because some of us “wear our foreignness on our faces.”

One thing I found particularly insightful is when she said that it “takes the third generation” to want to recapture their grandparents’ culture and reconcile it with their own, after the first generation tends to cling on to their home country’s culture and the second generation tries to eschew their parents’ foreignness. I find that that’s very true despite the fact that it doesn’t directly apply to myself. But I’m neither first nor second generation, but an in-between “1.5 generation” as I’ve heard it called. Having been born in Japan and spending a short few years there (which makes me technically first generation) and then growing up in the United States (which also makes me have much in common with the second generation), I seem to have somehow gone through and transcended all three of these steps that Lauren Kessler talked about.

So now I go to events like Mochitsuki.

(Picture “stolen” from the Mochitsuki website, since my camera broke in Japan)

This year’s annual Japanese-American New Year’s celebration took place yesterday, January 17th at Portland Community College’s Sylvania campus.

There was the Cultural Fair with booths, an ice-carving demonstration through the Portland-Sapporo Sister City Association (it was definitely COLD enough outside!), and yes, mochi-pounding and mochi-eating. But the big event was the show that occurred in the Performing Arts Center.

And as with last year, the highlights for me were the performances by Portland Taiko. I love these guys. They’re imaginative, loud, and lots of fun. I love their bits of choreography and their powerful sound, and I love that they really have a modern sensibility that works. I actually took a class with them a year ago and thoroughly enjoyed it (I’ve always wanted to be a drummer, too!) but haven’t “gotten around” to continuing to take any more. I feel inspired…I wonder if they have spots left for the next class?

…And if you have no idea what I’m talking about with this taiko, go look it up! There’s other ensembles elsewhere in the country, particularly if you’re on the West Coast.