TAIKO!!!

Ojiisans taking aim during the festival's archery competition.

So, today was the Nakayama Drum Festival, all day long! Chrazy Chris and I met up with my teacher from my tiny mountain school (still no name. Dag.), watched a little taiko action, then had lunch with her family and friends. Gooood Times.

The festival was great, it was great to see the kids there, and I think they appreciated seeing us. Chris is the elementary school ALT, so the kids knew him too. After lunch we found Jen and Melissa, enjoyed a couple more hours of good taiko, took a ton of pictures (currently up and aaall free - public - on flickr).

So, the way the festival worked, contrary to my previous assumption that it would be several taiko groups performing individually, was that there was one central drum, another "secondary" drum, and two others just below the shrine. At times there would be one or two people playing (in addition to the drummers on the small drums), but mostly it was a big lineup of people moshing on their way to the drums. Sometimes they went in small circles on the same drum, sometimes it was one big serpentine rotation to all four of the drums. Sometimes the drums were played in unison, sometimes they were on different beats or "songs," if you will. The latter was a little hard on the old ears, but interesting nonetheless.

I might have liked to have gotten in the mix, as anyone was welcome to do, but even after listening to the kids practice at LMS and TMS, and listening for a few hours at the festival, I still couldn't get the beat. Even on the easy song they did towards the end, there were still a couple trick beats they threw in every so often. With my luck it'd be my turn when one of those came up. I guess I'll just have to practice so I can join in next year!

For you viewing pleasure, here is one of my two YouTuberized videos from the festival. I can't get the darn first one to embed, so you can see it here.