Every Friday night I play with a youth taiko group called Aka Fuji (Red Fuji).
This taiko group doesn’t use sheet music or recordings, you learn by watching and doing. So the first week I was right in line with the rest of the kids, trying to match rhythms and keep up, hopelessly groping for the correct motions. This was 4 months ago.
I’m getting better, but I’m further behind than I should be, at least further behind the other guys who started at the same time as me. It was especially bad tonight, exhausted from a week of weird sleep I started strong but quickly tapered off in accuracy and energy. I could tell the regulars noticed.
The group is run by adults but the actual sessions are run by the kids themselves. The senior-most girls, no more than 15 years old, are excellent. They are precise and skillful without being overbearing during teaching moments. When I miss cues or movements of a song that’s supposed to be the easy, I catch glances that rival disapproving mother on the scale. When I screw up I feel like it’s intensified by the fact that I’m older and a foreigner. So I’ve got to prove to them that Americans aren’t completely rhythm deficient oafs and deal with the easy to acknowledge but difficult to accept fact that skill does not inherently scale with age. True, these kids have been doing this since they were 8 or 9, some even started at age 6.
Maybe it’s not about age or proving anything, it just sucks to suck. But I still go, even on nights where I could bow out. Taiko was one of the only things on my to-do list before I came to Japan and I’m going to wring…bang the hell out of every opportunity to improve. If I can find a group back in the states to join I would be there in a heartbeat. Especially if I knew I could get to this level:
Note this is a different taiko group.
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