Jan 1 (Mon), 2024 / Last updated : Dec 28 (Thu), 2023 melanie Posts by Members, ,

Happy New Year

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Jan. 1, 2024

New Year’s Greeting from Kodo Ensemble Leader Yuichiro Funabashi

I wish you all a very happy new year.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to everyone who offered us their support throughout the past year. Thank you very, very much.

Last year, we toured in the USA and Canada with “Kodo One Earth Tour: Tsuzumi” and China with “Kodo One Earth Tour: Warabe,” returning to these countries for the first time in four years. Here in Japan, we toured with main stage productions “Calling,” “Shoso,” and “Cycles,” as well as our School Workshop Performance tours. We also held three concert series here on Sado in the spring, summer, and autumn. We enjoyed a wide range of thrilling collaborations, which included: “Yugen” with Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando, “Oni” with Niigata dance company Noism, “Hatsune Miku x Kodo” with vocaloid Hatsune Miku, and our long-awaited reunion concert with The Voices of South Africa on the main stage at Earth Celebration 2023. The list goes on. It sure was an action-packed year of performances.

In 2023, many of the Kodo concerts that were postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic were able to go ahead at long last. The year was filled with joyous reunions with collaborators and audiences, and feeling of profound gratitude as we shared the sound of our taiko with more people in person.

We’ll begin 2024 with our “Warabe” Europe Tour during the winter months. From spring, we’ll perform throughout Japan with our One Earth Tour and School Workshop Performances, followed by the premiere of “Evermore,” a new work we will present exclusively at Asakusa Public Hall. At the end of this year, we are excited to share another new touring production with you all. At home on Sado Island, we look forward to welcoming locals and visitors to our Special Performances in Shukunegi in spring, and our annual festival Earth Celebration in summer. We will also hold the Kodo Summer Concerts and Autumn Concerts that we launched in 2023, hoping to share more of the charms of Sado Island with everyone who comes along.

With the chaos of wars and the impact of climate change, it is difficult to predict what lies ahead. But I promise we will keep striving to foster a world where myriad cultures and ways of life resonate with one another. Kodo will remain dedicated to its mission to connect people, traveling the globe with taiko under the banner “One Earth.”

I sincerely hope that the year ahead is a great one for all of you.
2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon, and we’ll do our very best to make it a year of great growth.
I kindly ask for your continued guidance and encouragement.

 


Yuichiro Funabashi
Leader
Kodo Taiko Performing Arts Ensemble

Jan 1 (Wed), 2025 / Last updated : Jan 9 (Thu), 2025 melanie Posts by Members

Happy New Year

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Jan. 1, 2025

New Year’s Greeting from Kodo Ensemble Leader Yuichiro Funabashi

I wish you all a very happy new year.

On behalf of Kodo, I would first of all like to offer our sincere condolences to everyone who was affected by the Noto Peninsula Earthquake one year ago today. Please know you are in our thoughts as you continue to deal with its after-effects.

Looking back over the past year, we were fortunate to be able to have a wide range of performances throughout Japan, overseas, and here on Sado Island. These concerts included collaborations with guest artists NAKIBEMBE EMBAIRE GROUP from Uganda who joined us at our summer festival Earth Celebration, and Korean drum (Janggu) performer Choi Jaechol who joined us for our year-end touring production, “Mountains.” When we travel, connect with people, get together, eat and play music together, we feel joy and reaffirm what’s important to us. I really felt that firsthand throughout 2024.

In the past few years, Kodo’s solo projects have been on the rise. I can see our members broadening their expressive range through these opportunities. Collaborations and exchange in different fields, such as sports, theater, and dance to name a few, invigorate and inspire us, and teach us a lot. They sometimes make us feel uneasy or scared, and can make us feel conflicted, too. But going outside your own community and putting yourself into another one creates time for you to understand your own abilities and where you are at right now. Also, you get to experience how taiko and music connect and resonate between people, showing that genres and borders pose no obstacle. These experiences bring depth to our group. If I liken Kodo to the human form, I feel these experiences serve as leg and core training, strengthening us from the ground up.

In 2025, we look forward to bringing the sound of taiko to you all, starting in mid-January with our North America tour. In recent years, we’ve been enjoying more opportunities to perform on Sado Island, too. I hope you’ll come and spend some time on the island and immerse yourself in the lifestyle and culture that surrounds us here—the place we call home, where every Kodo performance takes shape.

I hope this year is filled with joy for all of you. We will do our very best to cheer you on throughout the year with the resonant sound of our taiko.
I kindly ask for your continued guidance and encouragement.


Yuichiro Funabashi
Leader
Kodo Taiko Performing Arts Ensemble

Jan 1 (Thu), 2026 / Last updated : Dec 31 (Wed), 2025 melanie Posts by Members

Happy New Year 2026!

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Jan. 1, 2026

New Year’s Greeting from Kodo Ensemble Leader Yuichiro Funabashi

I wish you all a very happy New Year.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the many people in Japan and around the world who supported the Kodo group’s activities throughout last year. Thanks to all of you, we were able to share a wide range of performances throughout 2025, including our One Earth Tour, School Workshop Performance tour, and Earth Celebration concerts. It was truly encouraging for us to share Kodo today with audiences far and wide.

Meanwhile, we are keenly aware that we are touring while serious problems intensify around us. The world is in a state of instability due to climate change, conflicts, and disasters. In Japan, people are grappling with the declining birth rate and aging population, a lack of workers in certain industries, and questions about how to sustain regional events as populations decline. Our home, Sado Island, is one of the many areas facing these challenges. Amidst these global and local situations, this past year has led me to deeply reconsider what it means to be a taiko player, and how Kodo should stand alongside society and engage with it.

You could liken Kodo Apprentice Centre to Kodo’s origins—it’s a place where people study not only taiko technique but also learn important lessons from their daily life, nature, and connections with others. Cleaning, cooking, doing farm work, and working with people in the local village may, at first glance, seem far removed from taiko, but they cultivate the very foundation of our sound. Kodo’s journey since its inception has taught us this, and we are committed to carefully passing these learnings on to the next generation.

Furthermore, I hope that Kodo can harness the unique physicality of taiko players—suppleness, a strong and centered core, and senses finely attuned to others—to create performances while also developing our organization. I want Kodo to be open, working to transcend regions, generations, and cultures. Little by little, I aim to move Kodo away from the image of doing something extraordinary to doing something relatable, so more people can connect with our work and group more easily.

Kodo celebrates its 45th year in 2026. I see this milestone as a new point of departure as Kodo steps into its next 45 years. We are planning a year of commemorative performances, domestic and international tours, projects and workshops on Sado Island, and enhancements that help Kodo Apprentice Centre offer an even more enriching experience.

We will keep striving to make the sound of our taiko envelop you and give you strength. I am personally looking forward to a wide range of new challenges this year as we walk the road ahead together.

I kindly ask for your continued guidance and encouragement in the year to come.

Yuichiro Funabashi
Leader
Kodo Taiko Performing Arts Ensemble

 

Dec 6 (Wed), 2017 / Last updated : Dec 6 (Wed), 2017 melanie Posts by Members, ,

“Kodo Duo Masayuki & Yuta” by Yuta Sumiyoshi

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Nov. 26, 2017

Photo: Takashi Okamoto

The duo of senior performer Masayuki Sakamoto and new comer Yuta Sumiyoshi (that’s me) was first formed in 2012 for the piece Kusa-wake in the “Amaterasu” production. For the five years that followed, I think I have spent more time than anyone else watching Masayuki perform in pieces such as Kei Kei, Hekireki, Kaden, and Dan.

Photo: Takashi Okamoto

I am grateful for the fact that I often was given the chance to perform right opposite Masayuki.

Photo: Mayumi Hirata

We played the piece Kusawake in Amaterasu, at Kanamaru-za, in “Mystery,” and “DADAN”.

That means we must have played that piece together in front of an audience over four hundred times to date.
Masayuki often said, “I wonder how many times we’ll play that together again…”
So when the day came when I said to myself, “There’s only two times to go!,” I felt a wave of emotion well up inside me.

Photo: Takashi Okamoto
Soon after I joined Kodo, Masayuki returned from Kodo’s Europe tour in the springtime and I trained under his instruction for the first time.

I seem to recall we were working on the shime-jishi taiko part of the piece SHAKE

However, what we were focusing on wasn’t phrasing or strokes. It was the atmosphere you create before you drum.
If you know SHAKE, then you probably know what that means, because SHAKE begins with a lead-in by the shime-jishi drum. Masayuki taught me that before you play the first beat, you should feel as though you are gathering the eyes and ears of the hundreds of audience members to all focus on your two hands.

“When you want to diffuse or draw in energy, you express that by changing the angle of your chest!” 
Even now, I still recall his words when I take the stage.

Photo: Takashi OkamotoI open up my chest when I move forward, and I drop my chest when it’s my turn to perform the backing part. The accents of the sound, and expression using my chest, it’s really about the music and your body speaking the same language.

Masayuki and I often enjoyed drinks together. Whether we were in Japan or abroad, he often took me out for drinks. (Or maybe I was the one who said “Let’s go!” more often than not…)
The first time Masayuki came to the Kodo dormitory to drink with me, I was so happy to drink with him that I drank too much in the first half hour and collapsed, so poor Masayuki was left drinking alone.
When it was Masayuki’s 30th birthday, I planned a huge BBQ in the garden at Kodo Village for him.

Photo: Takashi Okamoto
When we drink together, we talk a lot. It ranges from rambling about this and that to talking in depth about taiko. I got to know Masayuki’s character and nature, I learned about the mottos he holds dear, and we had a lot of silly fun together.

Our memories include the time we went to a yakiniku (BBQ) restaurant that wasn’t all-you-can-eat, and panicked in horror at the tremendous bill we racked up.
The time I went shopping with indecisive Masayuki to chose his new guitar.
The time we jumped in the sea, but the waves in the Sea of Japan were so powerful they threw us up onto the rocks.
We became hooked on having jam sessions with me on ukelele and Masayuki on guitar.
One time, we went for a run together before going out to drink German beer so the effects of the two activities would cancel each other out. This led us to come up with a saying that compares the quality of a “zero” from not doing something to the qualilty of the “zero” you get by canceling things out.
Each one of these memories were seeds we sowed that brought us closer together as colleagues and led to our perfectly matched sound on stage.


Masayuki is a guy who turns fake stoicism into his reality.
No matter how light his clothing and how cold he looks, he will say, “I’m not cold.”
No matter how tough the situation or how pale his face goes, he will say, “It’s a breeze.”
He is competitive about weird things, so even if he isn’t interested in something, if you cheer him on he will get in there and do it.

Photo: Ryotaro Leo Ikenaga
I sincerely respect Masayuki and I still look up to him.
He is a down-to-earth, friendly senior member who makes me always want to be at his side.

Photo: Takashi Okamoto
Masayuki is going to graduate from the Kodo group, and that means that I am going to graduate from playing with Masayuki.
My goal all along has been to stand out more than Masayuki, and now I am going to graduate from spending my days standing alongside him on stage.
There’s only two performances left. Niigata and Sado.

The “DADAN 2017” tour will continue throughout December, but Mitsuru Ishizuka and I were double-cast for this tour and Mitsuru is taking over for the December performances. So I will only perform two more times with Masayuki before the changeover.

Whether I cry or smile about it, there’s just two times to go.

Please, come and see our Niigata performance!

Please, come and see our Sado performance!

“DADAN 2017” Japan Tour

*Please note that this blog was translated after the two performances listed above.

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