3 Things I Learned Learning Taiko
I work in the game development industry. And like a lot of creative professionals who had been working on their passions for a while, my passion had turned into my work, and so I had my work and nothing else. That’s not a good thing for a creative professional. Players of your games know subconsciously when your fire is gone. So, when I turned to my brother for advice, he told me to find another hobby, something to spark delight in me and move my heart once more. I tried different things like sword fighting and coffee appreciation. But I realized I liked sword fighting more in theory than actuality. And while I liked coffee, I realized a cup of 7/11 coffee did the job for me.
One day, I found an announcement that a Japanese Taiko group called Drum Tao was coming to town. So, my sister and I went and watched them. And it was awesome.
It was not my first time watching a Taiko performance. Years before, when I was still studying, I was at camp one summer in Nagano in Japan. And there was a Taiko drummer who played for us while we danced the Bon Odori around a fire. And even then, I was fascinated with Taiko and how its low booming beats could move hearts.
After watching Drum Tao, I searched and searched the internet until I finally found where I could learn Taiko for a week in Japan. And it was a wonderful soul-satisfying experience.
But I learned how Taiko, much like the other Japanese arts, was taught very differently from western and even Filipino art forms. We would normally learn art for its techniques. If we learned Taiko here, our focus would primarily be how to play the drums (duh, right?). But in Fukui, we were taught the way of the drums. Taiko was not merely an instrument. It was a lifestyle.Allow me to share the three key lessons I learned during that week-long camp. These lessons really stuck with me, and I believe they can be applied in other art forms and creative endeavors. The first thing I learned is that Taiko is a heart thing. Yes, we play using our hands. Yes, we know the rhythm in our minds. But the one that sings to produce the music is the heart. The heart, the mind and the body are the three parts that needs to move to perform Taiko, but the starting point is the heart. Therefore, the first thing that needs to be done is to calm the heart so that it can sing. We always started training with meditation.
That made sense to me. We always regard artists as moody people. Any art form, after all, is an expression of emotions and ideas. And art without emotion doesn’t have much of a point, if you think about it. We put up paintings or play music because seeing or hearing them makes us feel certain things. But we often just leave our hearts alone and wait for them to cooperate. It wasn’t so when I was learning Taiko. Here, we needed to discipline our hearts by calming them down at the start of practice. And during practice, our teacher, Kurumaya-sensei, would always call us out when “our hearts weren’t singing.”
The second thing I learned was to always start with the basics. The foundation of Fukui Taiko was an underlying beat called the Mitsu-uchi, three hits to a beat. And after meditation, we would always start practice by first playing it.
We don’t put a lot of importance on foundation in our creative industries here, it seems. Let’s take game art, for example. We learn 3D modeling and animation for game art. And its foundation is actually figure drawing. But we learn figure drawing for one or two terms, and that’s it (some schools don’t even have figure drawing at all, reasoning that one can do 3D even without knowing how to draw. But, darling, if your character’s hands look like bananas in a sketch, they will still look like bananas in 3D). I can’t blame completely how the local institutions teach creatives, though. Because of our low labor cost and inability to budget for long periods, we need to teach and churn out graduates quickly. And mastery takes time. But it still saddens me that it’s hard for us to produce master artists because of this set up. But that’s for another time to talk about.
Taiko demanded we play the Mitsu-uchi everyday before each practice. This is a whole different level of foundation building! And we can’t complain because sensei had been doing Mitsu-uchi practice everyday in his 52 years of doing Taiko. And we could see the difference in his playing. Our 70-year old sensei had better and more powerful control over the Taiko than many experienced western drummers in their prime I know. If you looked at us in class, we looked like we were just holding the drum sticks. But when sensei played, he possessed them. That was what a solid foundation achieved.
This also made sense to me. Sensei treated his tools like his partners in producing a heart-moving performance. It only made sense to treat those partners with respect. And I think back on the computer I left back home, my tool of the trade. It was dusty and probably even had crumbs between the keys from my snacking in front of it. I resolved to learn this by heart, this attitude of respect. And step one would be to clean my computer and my work area.
All in all, Taiko camp was an exciting place where I learned very important lessons about life as a creative professional. I would most likely join the camp again next year, this time for two weeks. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to embody the lessons I learned from camp. So that when I return in April next year, hopefully I’ll be a better and more disciplined creative.
