Taiko drums

I have mentioned before that there is a park across the street from us. Last weekend it was the site of some sort of cultural festival. Not sure exactly what, but on Saturday night we could hear lots of music and voices over the loudspeaker, so we decided to wander down there and check it out. They had set up a temporary stage, and when we arrived there were four old women dressed in traditional kimono with fans, performing a dance (didn't think to get a photo, unfortunately).

When their number was over, a large group of teenagers dressed in what looked to us like black karate outfits started preparing for their act. This involved putting drums of varying sizes in specific locations on the stage. When they rolled out "the big one" (it took two kids to carry it, and was set up on a stand of its own), we figured this was definitely going to be interesting enough to stick around for.

The performance was an extremely impressive display of high-precision, choreographed drumming. Craig struck up a conversation in English with a man standing next to him who turned out to be the students' teacher; they were performing on traditional taiko drums.

I haven't done a lot of research into taiko, but it appears that they have existed for centuries and are associated with Japanese martial arts. Perhaps that would explain why the students were dressed the way they were; they even had rather warlike white belts tied around their heads. Later on all the boys took their shirts off which kind of added to the "look" -- although maybe that was just to cool down because the drumming was pretty vigorous (too bad for the girls!). In more recent decades, taiko performances of the sort we witnessed have become very popular. And no wonder! They are really, really cool.