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Buddhist philosophy in taiko

This particular form of taiko, or why I got into playing taiko, seemed to fit. It was no teachers. It has some Japanese culture involved in it. It has some Japanese Buddhism involved because, philosophically, Reverend Mas says that when you perform, you have to try to perform with the non-self—egoless-ness—in which taiko groups are magnification of the community, in which individual problems are going to happen, but you have to deal with it. When you play, you need to consciously play your part in your piece, but you have to be aware of everybody else at the same time. So all those kinds of things that you have some Buddhist philosophy and concept in them, and yet that helps move the group forward. You can have all these things stepping back and moving forward all the time, but all of a sudden you have this micro family kind of a thing. So that’s a practical application of Buddhism, in Jodo-Shinshu Buddhism, in which it’s not necessarily—it’s all participation. It’s on a very, very simple level of just participating in life, in understanding your surroundings.


drum music religion taiko

Date: October 15, 2004

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Art Hansen, Sojin Kim

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

John Yukio “Johnny” Mori is a musician and arts educator/administrator from Los Angeles.

Born November 30, 1949, he is the second son of his Issei father and Nisei mother. As a young man, he was an early activist, draft resistor, and general hell-raiser during the Asian American Movement in the 1970s, and ran the Amerasia Bookstore in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. The shop was a co-operative bookseller that also served as a community meeting place and political action and performing arts venue. Mori went on to travel the globe as a percussionist for the jazz-fusion band, Hiroshima, before retiring in 2003.

Mori is a seminal member of Kinnara Taiko, one of the first Japanese American taiko groups in the United States. For the past 20 years, he has also taught workshops on taiko and Japanese American culture to participants ranging from elementary school to university students. He currently serves as the Producing Director of Performing Arts at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles. (June 13, 2007)