Taiko, Erotics, and Anger

This chapter addresses how ideas about femininity, masculinity, and power are constituted through taiko. The author’s conflicts with a fellow taiko player are explored as sites where the gendered and racialized terms for empowerment were challenged. Asian American women taiko players’ passionate involvement in taiko is explored through two interviews with Sansei women. A workshop in Japan in 2001 with the small, virtuosic, professional all-woman ensemble Honō Daiko is described, detailing how their gendered bodily practice and costuming challenged ideas about femininity. Relationships between Asian American masculinity and popular culture ideas about the martial arts is then considered as a means through which Japanese and Asian American men reconstitute masculine strength, authority, and power.