Japan's Drum Culture

About this book

A festival guide gives the drums a sentence of atmosphere. A troupe photo book gives you one ensemble. Japan's Drum Culture does the missing job: 200 Japanese drums — the instruments themselves, the festivals they drive, the stages they conquered, the makers who build them and the culture that keeps them beating — in one uniform format, every entry giving History & Setting, Form, Hide & Making, Sound & Playing, and Visiting, Hearing & Care, each entry written in full at 200+ words.

The barrel-bodied nagado and the three-metre odaiko. The rope-tuned shime and the hourglass tsuzumi the noh actor squeezes for pitch. A thousand drums at Morioka's Sansa Odori, the demon drums of Sado, the drum that calls the crowd to sumo, the first dance of the goddess Uzume on an upturned tub. Then into the workshop for zelkova shells, cowhide, the great skinning day and tuning by rope, and out again to school gyms, senior teams, deaf players who feel the beat, and the world stages of Kodo and Drum Tao.

A front chapter teaches you to hear a drum in four checks — strike, skin, shell and space. There is no audio and there are no photographs: the sound is taught in words, for the ear and the body. Fees, hours, schedules, stock and prices are never asserted; every entry asks you to confirm them on the official channel, and states honestly which drums you may strike and which you may only hear.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.