Stony Brook's Taiko Tides drum club offers safe space for Asian students

Eva Nagase remembers well the beating of taiko drums reverberating through the air like “background music” during her childhood in Japan.

“Every summer, my parents brought me back to Japan to spend summer with my grandparents,” she said. “I heard this wonderful music of taiko, and I always wanted to play.”

Now the Stony Brook University lecturer hears these drums as faculty adviser to Taiko Tides, a student club of about 20 members who practice the art and carry on the rich tradition of this ancient instrument. “The taiko rhythm was in me, I guess,” Nagase said.

For the daughter of Japanese immigrants, the love of these drums beats in rhythm to her advocacy of Asian American and Pacific Islander causes.

Connecting with Japanese culture in this way has in a sense helped root the Sound Beach resident, who was born upstate and whose father, an IBM researcher, shifted his family every three years between Japan and New York.

Parents teach their kids to play taiko drums, monks use them in ceremonies and festival goers beat the taiko as they parade through streets, but it was only 20-some years ago when Nagase, who said she is in her 50s, began settling down to learn taiko as one of the club’s first members.

When you start learning about something, you realize how much you don’t know.

- Eva Nagase, professor of Japanese studies at Stony Brook

“When you start learning about something, you realize how much you don’t know,” said Nagase, who has taught Japanese studies at Stony Brook since 1993. “I face my own ignorance and try to learn more.”

On one of their weekly Friday night practices this month, Taiko Tides members rehearsed for four hours in a classroom, perfecting routines for the Cherry Blossom Festival held on campus.

Projected on a white screen resembling strategy for a football game were members’ names next to drums and arrows for movement, showing how the drums would be moved on the stage and off for different performances.

“Kane must go with shime,” one student said to the others, referring to matching a dish-shaped bell, which is called kane, with a small, high-pitched drum, which is called a shime.

Taiko drums can be a little larger than dinner charger plates and as massive as 10 feet in diameter, traditionally made of wood. They’re versatile; many can be beaten on the top, bottom and rims, and they can be positioned on stands for drumming from the top or the sides.

Watching a taiko performance is like witnessing moving art. Two players can play one drum. Sometimes, one drummer beats on two drums at once. Players twirled their bachi — large drumsticks — with ease between their fingers as their arms swung in stylized motions to beat the drums. Their bodies moved in unison in a choreographed drama.

To perform one of the most daunting and well-known taiko drum songs, “Chichibu Yatai Bayashi,” four of the most experienced Taiko Tides members sat on the floor that night, legs outstretched. They leaned back to play, relying on their abdominal muscles to keep them upright during intense drumming.

“This is just like a full-on core workout,” said chemistry major Ryan Chatchadathran, 19. “You’re supposed to not look at the drum and you’re supposed to keep your back straight, so that means you have to look above the drums. When you bring your hand back, that added weight really makes you want to . . . just give in and drop to the floor.”

When Nagase and husband, Joe Dvorak, performed on a drum together, the students watched raptly from their seats. Dvorak, an unofficial club adviser, spread his legs wide and pounded hard. Nagase performed the “female style,” with slow dance movements in between lighter drumming.

“We call ourselves advisers, but we’re the old people who stay around and make sure it keeps going,” joked Dvorak, 59, and a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

SAVING THE CLUB

The pair is credited with saving Taiko Tides, founded in 2001 by Stony Brook biology professor Joan Miyazaki.

Miyazaki, Nagase’s mentor, retired about 15 years ago, and Nagase took over the reins as club adviser.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, there was no practice and almost no club.

Nagase and Dvorak started hosting Zoom meetings as students made drums at home by using Scotch tape to cover the top of plastic trash cans. They looked at videos together of taiko activities. They played drum songs over Zoom.

“We started with many of the previous year students, but COVID was hard on everyone, and by the end of the full year of COVID we only had four students,” Dvorak recalled. “At the very end of spring of that first full school year of COVID, things were starting to open up a bit, and we did one performance with one piece."

It was enough to keep it together.

“From those four, we slowly rebuilt,” he said.

DRUM MAKERS

The couple has also been drum makers, working in Dvorak’s wood shop to create most of the club’s 20 or so drums. They’ve fashioned the instruments by stretching cowhide over PVC piping and empty wine barrels.

Wine barrels have been the preferred materials for many North American taiko drums, the couple said. The U.S. interest in taiko started decades ago on the West Coast, especially in California, home to many popular wineries. The used barrels were a cheap alternative to the wood taiko drums, which can cost thousands of dollars.

The staves, wood pieces of the barrel, are disassembled for shipping, and Dvorak finds it a challenge when he and his wife have to glue them together and make sure they hold their shape while they install the hoop around them — all in about 15 minutes before the glue dries. Later, they stretch cowhide over both ends, tightening it as much as possible and bolting the skin to the staves.

When the taiko drum is ready for its virgin beat, listening to the first tone — tinny, deep or flat — can be a scary moment, Dvorak said.

“If you don’t have the skin tight enough, it doesn’t sound so good,” he said. “You never know until you’re done.”

AAPI ADVOCACY

Taiko grew popular in this country among the descendants of Japanese immigrants, Nagase said.

Taiko drumming is like a heartbeat.

- Eva Nagase, professor of Japanese studies at Stony Brook

“They were so far apart from their heritage, because the first generation and second generation wanted to separate themselves from their history,” forget what had happened in World War II and assimilate into this country, she said. “When they were looking for the connection, taiko was something that they found. Taiko drumming is like a heartbeat. I think it also has something to do with the art form.”

Nagase’s connection with taiko dovetailed with her growing advocacy for Asian American and Pacific Islander issues in the past 10 years. She recalled a “scary” moment with discrimination at a Long Island supermarket, where a self-checkout machine was not working, she said.

“Somebody behind me said, ‘Oh, if you can’t read, go back to China,’ ” Nagase recounted. “You freeze. Basically, I did not have tools. That scary feeling lasted a while.”

Then in 2020, as some people blamed China for the pandemic, many of her students reported having a hard time following an uptick in reported attacks against Asians.

A 2024 report from Stop AAPI Hate, a national database collecting information on Asian hate crimes, found that about half of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders surveyed said they experienced a hate act in 2023 due to their race.

Nagase said she and other faculty members formed the AAPI Mentorship Network at Stony Brook to help students reach their education and life goals and to fight bias. They and students also created university programming for AAPI Heritage Month, which runs through May, with events and discussions.

“I really, really felt there was a need for support,” Nagase said.

This month, Nagase received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, including for her outside class activities for AAPI students.

At Taiko Tides, students call the couple “Nagase sensei” and “Joe sensei,” using the Japanese word for teacher. The club members are invited to end-of-semester parties at the couple’s home. Dvorak hosts trips to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he works on the national synchrotron light source, a massive ring that uses medium-energy electrons that generate ultra-bright beams of light to help reveal the structure of materials.

Nagase said she hares her life experiences to help students whose goals may differ from those of their immigrant parents — she herself trained to be a doctor like her mother but dropped out because she got too emotionally attached to her patients. “I try to help them [the students] to see what they really want,” she said.

Each practice begins and ends with everyone sitting in a circle to meditate for a minute or so to “cleanse” their minds, followed by bowing, a sign of respect.

Most of the students are not Japanese Americans but are Asian Americans who say the appreciate the space created by their taiko advisers, a setting where they’ve made good friends and explored one another’s cultures.

“It allows us to bond over shared cultural experiences and exchange cultural knowledge,” senior Ollie Qui, of Roselle Park, New Jersey, said in a text message. “I feel that everyone’s open-mindedness and shared connection to the exchange of cultures creates a great environment that acts as a safe space for AAPI students. I appreciate having this community, and I think that everyone should be able to feel secure in their identity.”