Taiko Masters

"Taiko got a boost in the 1970's when the Japanese Government authorized funds to help preserve the intangible cultural assets that were slowly vanishing in the post-war era."
Source: Taiko overview, history.


Taiko is the Japanese word for drum, though in my experience, English-speakers have used the phrase "taiko drumming" to refer to the activity pictured above. The International Beer Summit was held in Umeda this past weekend, featuring various multicultural samples of beer, food, and music/dance. The taiko were used to represent Japanese culture, just as the bagpipes were used to represent Scotland and smiling women in sequined dresses were used to represent Thailand.
Taiko is a significant part of Japanese history, used in battle and religious ceremonies, but--as the website says--its use changed and became more popular in "modern" (post-WWII) Japan. The taiko performance at the Beer Summit seemed as though it was meant to showcase traditional Japan, however.



This may be a more obvious image of "modern" Japan, however. At major arcades anywhere in Japan, Taiko Drum Master is a favorite. The idea is that the player "reads" the music onscreen and hits the taiko accordingly. The song options available range from the Mario Brothers theme song to karaoke hit "Linda Linda". The video game acts as though it is reconciling the traditional and contemporary sides of Japanese culture. Are the intangible cultural assets of Japan truly vanishing? Is the presence of taiko at beer summits and arcades evidence for or against that idea?
I say it is effective, because a large part of many cultures involves proving that the past is still important.

Creative Japan

During the 1990s, foreigners began to consider Japanese culture as "cool", so says the Japanese government. Visual anthropologist Steven Fedorowicz featured "Creative Japan", a website celebrating Japanese popular culture, in his blog on July 30th, 2007 (see post). The Japanese embassy in the UK and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan both have a hand in the maintenance and oversight of the website entitled "Creative Japan", and thus it is interesting to see how they claim foreigners (especially youth) should perceive Japan.

"Creative Japan" has a diverse display of aspects of Japanese contemporary culture: anime/manga, fashion, literature, technology, etc. Some text briefly covers what is significant about that sector of popular culture, complemented by small, blurry photos perhaps found on a Google image search. The visual accompaniment is lacking--sometimes indistinguishable or unexplained--and the editors should consider how foreigners likely visit this site for the pictures alone, perhaps scanning the text at best.

"Creative Japan" gives off the sense that Japan is a nation proud of how its emerging culture has reached the corners of the world. It is celebrating its uniqueness while allowing other cultures to embrace it. As my anthropology professor Jeff Hester has lectured, "Nihonjinron" is a term referring to the discussion of the uniqueness of Japanese culture in relation to foreign countries, and I feel that "Creative Japan" is an example of this. Of course it is difficult to capture the essence of a living culture in a few fuzzy photos and abstract text, but I believe they express the point quite well.

Please visit Creative Japan to develop your own opinions. The movie still displayed at the beginning of this post is taken from Creative Japan's anime section.

Stifling Aesthetics

"In Japanese cities the nights are bright. Too bright. Streets, railway stations, offices, shops, vending machines—all vie in their brightness for people's use. The entire interior of convenience stores is luminous. Unfamiliar with the calming effect of balanced lightness and darkness, the Japanese perceive a dark city as desolate. While there has been repeated mention of reviewing the excessive brightness of cities, nothing has changed; rather, cities are calling for more brightness amid economic doldrums."
-Makoto Ueda, "Summer Living in Japan"
See website


This photo was taken in a keitai--or cellular phone--store in Hirakatashi. This particular store offers the top three brands of phones, which are Softbank, au, and DoCoMo. The photo captures the cluttered, fluorescent aesthetics of the store as well as the concentrated, formal process a customer must endure in purchasing a phone for the first time. Surely such a long, tedious, and important rite of passage as buying a phone should be performed in more comfortable lighting.


Again, like moths, Japanese people seem to constantly flutter around bright, pretty lights, especially in a place such as an arcade. An arcade is naturally lit by the neon glow of screens and whirring machines. Many are loud, smoky, and filled with sad, lonely men gambling their funds on pinball. The aesthetics are terrible, in my and Mr. Ueda's opinion, but people are always going back for more.

It's All About Economics

In my economics class, many of our readings and discussions center around the fact that Japan is an aging society whose economy is inevitably bound for "negative growth" as the working-age population retires and reaches the average life span (Matsutani Akihiko, Shrinking-Population Economics: Lessons from Japan, 15). Of course this is an urgent issue for any society and the citizens within it, but it is still nice to see an industrialized nation looking away from its own problems and reaching out to "worlds less fortunate", even if it is just a request to add pocket change to a small bowl in Kyoto.

In reality, however, tourists to Japan are more likely to contribute their hard-earned money to Walt Disney himself as they wait in line to ride a modest ferris wheel in the Shinsaibashi area of Osaka. Select Disney characters with questionably different facial structures are plentiful in the parts of Japan I have visited thus far. A big part of the consumer culture revolves around toys and paraphernalia based off animated characters. This is interesting; how will this change as Japan's population ages and is replaced by fewer and fewer children to consume such goods?

Youth Embracing Tradition

Note: Please click on individual images for larger, more detailed versions.

Osaka experienced much action and tourism this weekend, as hot and drizzly as it was. At least two festivals took place within a reasonable distance from Hirakata City: the Danjiri Festival in Kishiwada as well as the Eisa Festival in Taisho.


This first photo is from the Danjiri Festival, a Shinto tradition where handcrafted floats are pulled at full speed by hundreds of people through the narrow streets, Shinto shrines as the destination. Though the shutter speed on my digital camera is rather inadequate, I like the photo above because of its blurry human figures against a clear background. It seems to capture the chaos and excitement of the lines of Japanese youth heaving these floats through town. They're an integral part of what makes this tradition happen every year but most spectators keep their focus on the floats instead.
(More information on Danjiri)


A grown man demonstrating how to carry and move with the flags during this particular Okinawan group's performance. The colors of the costumes attracted my camera initially, but I also enjoyed witnessing the wide range of age groups represented in the festival as a whole. Many children played key roles in the dance and drum performances, showing dedication to familial and regional traditions. Or maybe they just wanted to wear zebra print pants.

Japanese Women on Display

I have only been an unregistered alien in Japan for a couple of weeks, thus my visual anthropological collection is not yet extensive enough to where I can assign a theme to my photos. For my first entry, I have chosen to feature two photos of Japanese women, a broad enough "theme" to allow me to go in any direction, but also specific enough to make this post somewhat interesting.


This woman works in a candy shop in Kyoto. I found her and this shop, colorfully decorated, on a hill bustling with the flow of temple tourists and their cash. Women workers in such uniforms are plentiful in Japan, I have noticed, and thought it should be captured by film. The uniform suggests conformity and equality among coworkers, and yet the vivid colors of most of the uniforms draw attention to the women. The relationship between buyer and seller is obviously an important one in a capitalist society such as Japan, but why are female sellers the only ones usually dressed in such a way?



Today I went to Himeji Castle, a beautiful historical monument in Himeji City, and met these two lovely ladies enjoying their afternoon. Believe it or not, they are not real. Believe it or not, neither is the cat. I was attracted to the actual visual representation of the people who once lived in the castle, as most of it is dark and bare. Apparently one of these women is Princess Sen who lived "the happiest 10 years of her life" there with her husband. The emphasis given on her harmonious marriage and joyful stay at the castle rings some bells for me--one who's always skeptical of how history is presented--and I wonder how accurate this scene (pictured above) is.