ABSTRACT
Cultural manifestations reflect psycho-historical and intrapsychic experience and change. We tend to interpret a culture and a culture’s deep-seated concerns by looking not only at its politics, its social mores, its laws, and its customs, but, on an even deeper level, at its arts. Taiko, an ancient Japanese folk and classical drum tradition, was revived as a performance art in Japan by Daihachi Oguchi in 1951. By the late 1960s, it had become popular on the west coast of the USA, with its large Japanese population. Master Daichi Oguchi, the founder of contemporary taiko, led a taiko drumming and dancing ensemble in a performance during the Nagano 1998 Olympics. Drumming is heartbeat. Heartbeat is life. The physical experience of drumming increases sensitivity to one’s own physical rhythms, particularly heartbeat. Like all intensive and demanding physical activity, it increases sensitivity to physical sensations: muscular, vascular, respiratory, digestive, sensory.
