Slap Happy at the Festival

If you've been following this blog you may recall that on New Year's Day we saw a band of taiko drummers at the local shrine. I took quite a lot of photos of them that day and showed them to my Japanese sensei, Yuka. By coincidence, Yuka knew those very same drummers and effected an introduction that would culminate in Jessica and myself, bedecked in happi and hachimaki, slapping cowhide in a somewhat wayward fashion on a float in the 37th Kobe Matsuri less than five months later.

I've always been quite partial to a spot of taiko - I've seen the Kodo drummers three times, as recently as last year in Belfast. So when I found out that Yuka knew the people who ran the local drumming club I was initially quite excited about 'having a go' myself. I was brought down to earth rapidly by the bloke who ran it, who rather brusquely replied that my intended two years sabbatical in Japan was nowhere near long enough to learn taiko. In hindsight, what he actually meant was that I was middle-aged, unfit and having a laugh, but this was tempered by the suggestion that maybe Jessica could give it a whirl and I could watch.

So, since January, Sarah and myself have taking turns to take Jessica to Kobe Daiko every Saturday, and the three of us have tried to deduce what on earth is going on, as the lessons are delivered in Japanese and the rhythms annotated in hiragana. To her credit, Jessica has progressed very quickly from scratching her bum and pulling faces to giving it a real go.

When it comes to festivals, the Japanese certainly don't hold back, and the Kobe Matsuri is the biggest in the region. It is particularly renowned for its samba dancers, seemingly on the grounds that they apply the same approach to clothing as to the infamous waxing technique.

Jessica was willing enough to perform on the stage, but was not so impressed with the idea of appearing on the float, which was the exact opposite of how I felt about things, except I was none too keen on the float either. We struck a deal that Jessica would consider doing the float if I was prepared to make a fool of myself. I reasoned that I would at least be a moving fool, only fleetingly bearing my incompetence to the Kobe masses.

The taiko kids range in age from about four to nine, and they are superb. The mums are better than I could ever hope to be, and they all profess to be only making up the numbers. The morning stage performance went without a hitch. Jessica looked nervous, but acquitted herself well, and we then had a three-hour wait for our slot in the five-hour procession - we were number 91 in the queue. Although the festival route took 30 minutes to navigate, it was over in a flash. The exhilaration of the occasional sequences of drum-pounding that I could actually do, brought into sharp relief by Jessica's rolling eyes at the more frequent bits that I couldn't. At the end of it I was completely knackered, but the sense of achievement - and relief - was palpable.

The above photo will be submitted to Kansai Time Out's Chinatown Section 'How Many Chins?' competition.