The art of Japanese drumming is powerfully appealing to many people for equally as many reasons. Increasingly popular throughout the world, taiko has blossomed in the United States from its original West Coast Asian American roots, spreading throughout the country and into Canada and inspiring unique connections amongst individual participants in different localities. What embodying taiko means for one person may vary significantly for someone else. This malleability is precisely what makes taiko so attractive for both practitioners and scholars alike. Angela Ahlgren's Drumming Asian America offers an innovative and elegantly written new perspective on the significance of taiko and identity politics.
Ahlgren organizes her study both geographically and chronologically, starting with the story of San Jose Taiko on the West Coast in the 1970s and moving eastward to look at the continued use of taiko as activism today. She rightly argues that her consideration of the Midwest challenges standard coastal binaries, in turn exploring taiko in new geographical areas. Even though taiko continues to be predominantly performed by Asian Americans throughout the United States and Canada, her work expands questions of racial identity beyond Asian American, asking how whiteness and blackness are informed by taiko performance and vice versa. As another white woman who has researched and written about taiko in Japan, and who teaches taiko on the East Coast, I find the question of whether this is something “white people do” really intriguing. Ahlgren's successful inclusion of women, who so often are left out of the public history of taiko, is significant. Indeed, women are central to this study with female voices privileged. Further situating taiko within the LGBTQ community, a relatively little considered group within taiko studies, allows her to approach hypermasculinity associated with taiko through a queer lens, and this is important as “lesbian spectatorship and female masculinity in taiko have yet to be explored” (20).
In tackling these complex issues, the author does not circumscribe Asian America, but instead adds very important new dimensions to understanding identity work. Her research thus sits comfortably at the intersection of multiple methodological approaches, including autoethnography and embodiment of taiko herself (aided by her years working as stage manager for Theater Mu and then performing taiko with Mu Daiko in Minnesota [22]), incorporation of life history interviews, and groundbreaking analysis of queer and Asian American identity. She goes even farther theoretically, considering “cross-racial exchange in taiko” and “the role of performance and joy in activism” (22), the latter a particularly evocative idea in this current era of increased use of music in social justice work.
Ahlgren addresses activism by first asking “how the politics of the Asian American movement inspired and continue to resonate within the performances and practices of San Jose Taiko” as demonstrated in the well-known piece “Ei Ja Nai Ka” (Isn't it good?) by P. J. Hirabayashi. Both Asian Americans and non-Asians can “participate in and co-construct ‘Asian America’ through participatory performance” of this folk dance, a highlight of their own concerts as well as larger festival gatherings (27). West Coast taiko was and remains an important force in the Asian American Movement (AAM). Third-generation Japanese (sansei), who were active in both the AAM and origination of San Jose Taiko in the 1970s, were mindful of honoring the labor of first-generation Japanese (issei) and, with taiko, reminded people of the historical correlation with Asian American cultural politics. San Jose Taiko takes a particularly positive approach in creating this connection, expressing a desire for “peace, social justice, and equality” (28) in a uniquely—and authentically—Asian American performance practice through which collective dancing builds a cohesive community (33). Throughout this analysis, Ahlgren seamlessly intertwines details of performance with historical context of the Japanese American experience.
Ahlgren relies more on autoethnography in her subsequent exploration of taiko in the Midwest, in which she makes a potent differentiation between Mu Daiko's produced taiko concerts and outreach performance. This differentiation resonates with the initiatives of many taiko groups whose goals are quite distinct if preparing for a large-scale stage performance or loading a few drums in the car to lead an educational workshop with minimal performers. She chooses to focus on the “outreach performance to better understand Asian American racial formations in Minnesota” (49); to see “how Minnesotans (including Mu Daiko members) understand and perform their racial knowledge” (50). Through educational outreach, taiko raises awareness of Asian American identity and can serve “as a corrective to a lack of racial diversity” (57), but, on the other hand, taiko can create a certain exoticism, actually reinforcing Orientalist views (68). Relating the distinct experiences of different individual female members—a European/white American (i.e., the author) as opposed to a Korean American adoptee (life history interviewee)—reveals the complexity of reading racial politics in this context. She contends “that in addition to the feminist and Orientalist pleasures it may afford them, taiko also offers opportunities for white performer's usually unmarked racialization to be unsettled in productive ways” (84). In other words, “[w]hiteness becomes remarkable on the taiko stage” (85). Ahlgren necessarily then asks how do the experiences of African Americans resonate or differ from European/white and Asian Americans? As her interviewees reveal, “taiko is a space in which racism is downplayed in comparison to everyday life” (96).
Women's voices—and bodies—speak throughout the text, but Ahlgren takes an even closer look at gendered and sexual identity in her consideration of the all-women's-group Jodaiko. Despite a large percentage of North American female taiko players, there are actually few exclusively female groups and a certain sexism feeding the absence of women from the genealogy of taiko. Jodaiko “formed as a response to such inequalities, in an attempt to create more opportunities for women to play” (115). And Ahlgren's writing about female performers begins to revise this misleading history. Jodaiko also “creates visibility for often-invisible queer Asian American women by their performance of butch uniformity, or what [Ahlgren calls] ‘homo-geneity’” (113). She expands this approach through a “close reading of group leader Tiffany Tamaribuchi's solo number ‘O-daiko’ at the Pride in Art festival,” which, the author argues, “demonstrates how taiko performance can be queered through specific performance choices, context, and the complex and pleasurable relation between performer and spectator” (113). Through this lens masculine Asian women are revealed as an impossibility, since Asian men are already emasculated (122), and the Asian American lesbian goes unseen (124). But both Jodaiko's and specifically Tamaribuchi's performance “asks to be seen, heard, and felt as something out of the ordinary. Through her virtuosic performance, her queer gender performance, and the kinesthetic effects of the drumming, Tamaribuchi hails—and momentarily creates—queer spectators” (134). Ahlgren introduces other important female groups in this discussion, such as Toronto's Raging Asian Women and Boston's Genki Spark, but there are no extensive ethnographic studies of taiko on the East Coast of the United States nor in Canada. Her work thus also subtly calls for further localized studies of such identity politics of taiko performance throughout North America.
Ahlgren's approach overall is solid, critically appealing, and well written, making a significant contribution to contemporary taiko studies. Although she relates some musical detail throughout her book with glancing references to specific pieces and performances, autoethnographic reflection, and even deep consideration of the performance of several songs, scholarship on taiko could still go into greater analytical detail of just how sound impacts broader social theoretical assessment. When exploring racial-gendered-sexual identity, where is the question of artistic motivation? What sonically is inspiring this passionate and politicized expression of identity through the music of taiko? Ahlgren could bring her analysis on the body into better alignment with the sound of taiko. I nevertheless appreciate her continued engagement with identity politics and performing authenticity—modes of inquiry often dismissed by contemporary scholars as passé—but performers still grapple with these issues in regards taiko, so shouldn't scholars continue to do so as well? And in just the new and refreshing way that Ahlgren does here.
