Week 2: Reflections by Josh Yoon
Group: Orientalism in Taiko, facilitated by Joe Small & Tamiko Ooka
By Josh Yoon - Palo Alto, CA
The second session started out with a BANG, where all of the participants were treated to a wonderful performance by Nobuko Miyamoto singing Black Lives Matter. The flashes of images from a distant past made clear that while progress has been made, police brutality and blatant racism against minorities still persist here in the U.S. Moved by the lyrics, I was reminded of a picture I saw that was taken during the 1992 Los Angeles riots in response to the acquittal of the 4 police officers who senselessly beat Rodney King, where a protestor was holding up a sign that said “Same Shit, Different Year!!!” From there, I was also reminded of a protest held in downtown Palo Alto, where one of the speakers I listened to said that while it was nice to see the support for black lives, they were convinced that the world would just go back to the way things were before George Floyd was murdered. Nothing was going to change for the better.
There were definitely moments where I imagined myself living in a future where things were not getting better, but in fact much worse. What if police brutality continues to persist? What if justice is not brought upon the police officers who committed these heinous crimes? What if immigrants are sent home simply because they were not born here in the U.S.? What if we have the same president after this upcoming election? Rather than investing so much energy and time thinking about a future that has yet to even come to existence, I remind myself that here at this moment, I am living in the present. Leave it at the door! Now is the time for a lively discussion with fellow taiko community members.
With Joe Small, Tamiko Ooka, and everyone else in the ‘Orientalism in Taiko’ session, the second round of conversations went along many interesting avenues. One of our tasks beforehand was to read Deborah Wong’s insightful article about the Princess of China music video, featuring Chris Martin (Coldplay), Rihanna, and members of the Taiko Center of LA, which included Rev. Tom Kurai, Shih-wei Wu, Hayashida-san, and others. Some overlapping topics of discussion that came up included (1) media portrayal of Asians, (2) uses & misuses of Asian cultural elements, and (3) what authenticity means, especially in the context of taiko.
Some things that we discussed worth mentioning here: media portrayal of taiko is a recurring and controversial topic, for better or for worse. On one hand, if as a taiko community we want to spread the artform across the world, mainstream visibility and acceptance would help spark more interest, especially among those who had not seen or heard taiko before. On the other hand, however, it can introduce confusion over an artform that has a very rich past, which can be lost in translation or transmission, or even worse, swept aside. As many of us are (hopefully) painfully aware of, taiko stems directly from the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Asian American Movement during the late 1960s and early 70s. Instead, taiko in the media is frequently used as a prop and nothing more.
Furthermore, we noticed how the faces of taiko players participating in two music videos were hidden behind either blindfolds (UCLA Kyodo Taiko in the LP – Tokyo Sunrise music video) or ski masks (TaikoProject in the Thirty Seconds to Mars – Up in the Air music video). For us, these were clear examples of how Orientalism can produce an “othering” effect, almost as if their identities were stripped away from them and made homogenous. If I had been in any of their shoes at the time, perhaps I might have been more excited to be a part of this, but from an outside viewpoint, I felt that the collaborations clashed against each other. The taiko players looked…out of place. You might ask, ‘How exactly could the artists have done it differently?’ Hard to say at the moment, but I’ll take this (self-imposed) question as an opportunity to better educate myself. By next week, maybe I’ll have a better answer to this.
Keep an eye out for my final post next week! Also, if you want another viewpoint of the same group that I’m in, check out Carley Okamura’s posts. She’s been an awesome person to listen to during our discussions.