Bakuhatsu Taiko Wiki

The Bakuhatsu Taiko Wiki is a knowledge product meant to preserve useful knowledge and institutional memory for Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan, including information on repertoire, proceedings, and making drums.

The first iteration of the project was a collaborative with Issa Takada around 2017, though this first version was lost when the company hosting it went under. This second iteration was made in collaboration with Lisa Shigenaga and was a team project during the COVID pandemic, when we were mostly online for over a year. The pandemic was a disruption to many of the normal processes that underscore the cycle of collegiate taiko, and projects like this were meant to help preserve knowledge for the new “generations” (cohorts) of taiko players that joined during this time.

Any organization goes through a process of cumulative culture, in which practices, ideas, attitudes, knowledge, and behavior build on previous iterations and are maintained in an institutional memory. There are natural limits to cumulative cultures of taiko organizations, and like all cultures, they evolve. The recording of this information is not meant to hold the team in time or document for documentation’s sake. Rather, it is recorded to assist future musicians learn, feel, and move through their history.

The project was built to be a collaborative team project and to serve as a link to the various online repositories of information that the team uses, but barriers to entry include a learning curve on using the wiki and an (understandable) lack of interest spending extracurricular time devoted to writing about taiko instead of spending time in the music. But so far as it is useful to transcribe, research, and take notes as a musician, the additional step of indexing for future members might be an achievable workflow. While this wiki was meant for internal use, a project like this might serve useful to the greater collegiate or North American Taiko communities as well. Perhaps a future project?