The rousing beat of the taiko drum evokes a sense of “traditional” Japan. It conjures local community festivals, religious celebration, and, for some, the darkly energetic rumble of war. The musical genre of ensemble taiko drumming, however, is a post-WWII creation. In Taiko Boom, Shawn Bender introduces how, beginning in the early 1950s, a handful of groups succeeded in pairing innovative marketing, expressive performance styles, and creative musical arrangements to create the genre recognized internationally today as taiko drumming. Beyond his important collation of the historical development of the genre, Bender extends his analysis of taiko drumming as a “new folk performing art” (p. 12) into arenas that make this work a welcome contribution to studies of globalization, music, and Japan studies more generally.
At once an eminently local and successfully global musical form, taiko drumming is constrained and constituted by a tension, as taut as a drum-skin, between place and motion. Studies of music in contemporary Japan often focus on how global musical genres, such as jazz, reggae, or hip-hop, are localized in the Japanese context. Taiko Boom shifts this flow to instead examine how the global circulation of people and musical commodities has contributed to the domestic life of taiko. Bender terms taiko a “new folk performing art,” by which he highlights how discourses of locality and community produce both ideological and organizational effects on taiko instruction and performance. Authenticity in taiko drumming is built upon regional styles and locality. Taiko's relationship with “place” is confounded, however, by movement and circulation, even within the domestic context. Taiko is bound up by a familiar focus on embodied learning and group lineage, yet it mingles only awkwardly in the world of classical Japanese performing arts. And despite its broad appeal, taiko drumming moves to a different beat than popular music in Japan. Bender draws out the tension between the demands of locality and the attraction of a global sensibility as even locally rooted practitioners find themselves part of intraregional networks of performance and consumption within Japan. Outside Japan, however, regional specificity and post-WWII provenance fall away, as taiko has come to represent Japan writ large within international circulations of “world music.”
Bookended by the introduction and epilogue, the body of Taiko Boom is organized in two parts. Part 1 is broadly historical and includes four chapters. Part 2 hews more closely to analyses of the contemporary genre, featuring three ethnographically oriented chapters.
In part 1, chapter 1 examines drums and their marginalized makers: members of the burakumin, for whom taiko “represents not just the maintenance of an unbroken tradition of craftsmanship but also the legacy of generations of discrimination” (p. 37). Chapters 2 and 3 present a detailed genealogy of the development of taiko as a performance genre under four standard-bearing taiko ensembles and their charismatic leaders. The final chapter of part 1 takes up how governmental support for community festivals has helped to propel taiko's popularization over recent decades.
Part 2 centers on three discussions of how the emergence and popularization of taiko is reflected in experiences of taiko players. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the ramifications of idealized images of the drummers’ athletic body that were crystallized in the early decades of the genre and how these standards provoke questions regarding sex and gender, and conceptions of the Japanese body vis-à-vis the Western body. Chapter 6, on women in taiko, addresses the tricky relationship between physical power and sanctioned styles of sexuality and dress. This chapter, on how female players navigate a genre dominated by masculinist performance standards, is especially interesting and would be at home in a variety of undergraduate classes. Bender's final chapter and epilogue examine an attempt by the Nippon Taiko Foundation to standardize taiko teaching for music education, a process that entails delocalization at the same time that it conjures a potentially troubling nationalist framework for apprehending taiko.
The story of Japan's contribution to “world music” is reminiscent of that of a variety of cultural products, tourism programs, and campaigns for the cultivation of local community that have received much critical attention in the anthropology of Japan. The productive and problematic interplay between locality, national identity, and global engagement so central to Japan's modern experience lies at the core of Bender's analysis of taiko drumming. His engrossing ethnography details the development of the genre in a fine-grained historical genealogy of seminal taiko ensembles that is buttressed by Bender's extensive fieldwork among several contemporary taiko ensembles, including the world-renowned Kodo. If there is a critique to be made of this work, it is that the multi-sited Taiko Boom traverses too varied a landscape, leaving the reader with a historical footing and an array of interesting thematic chapters but in some ways wanting for a sustained argument. Nevertheless, as a wide-ranging text that contextualizes the domestic scene that gave rise to the successful international “boom” taiko has enjoyed in recent decades, Taiko Boom has the potential to be a welcome addition to many courses on contemporary Japan.
