Japan beating: The making and marketing of professional 'taiko' music in Australia

In 2001 I wrote an article on Japanese popular music in which I drew attention to ways in which pop that is apparently mimetic of Euro-American styles - not aurally marked as music that "sounds like" the non-Western people who make it - is nonetheless indigenously constituted and culturally determined. In thinking about musical performance by Australians that sounds and looks Japanese, one can analyse this kind of apparently mimetic activity from the other side, as an instance of the processes whereby musical styles and traditions are invested with new meanings in terms of cultural and individual identities "inside" and "outside" Japan. A group of Australians dressed in partially Japanese attire, virtuosically beating huge wooden drums and occasionally emitting shouts of joyous mutual encouragement reminiscent of the 'kakegoe' calls of Japanese festival musicians - all carefully illuminated on stage before a well-heeled audience at a concert hall in the heart of Australia's largest city. This spectacle brings to mind an assertion Michael Taussig makes in 'Mimesis and Alterity': "the making and existence of the artefact that portrays something gives one power over that which is portrayed".