At our annual Fall Workshop, we welcomed 11 new members to the club! The incoming Generation 12 dedicated many hours each week to practice and social events, and had a great time performing at their first taiko performances. This year, we performed at many long-standing campus events, which we’ve been invited to in the past, including Dawg Days’ Late Night Carnival, Asian American Community Dinner, and NSU’s Day of Remembrance. We also performed at Traditional Chinese Dance’s Spring showcase for the first time! We are grateful to these organizations and RSOs for their continued support of our club, and we’re always happy to reciprocate the support.

Outside of UW, we also performed for Redmond City Lights, Edmonds Elementary Multicultural Night, OCA 2025, and Kubota Garden Summer Thunder. We also had the opportunity to return to Seijin-Shiki USA for the sixth year in a row, and Sakura-Con for the thirteenth year! We are grateful for the opportunities we’ve had over the past year, and we look forward to returning to many of these events in the upcoming year.

Many of our club members also represented us at this year’s Intercollegiate Taiko Invitational (ITI), held at Stanford University in May. Those who attended had a wonderful time meeting taiko groups from across the West Coast and learning from professional taiko musicians and teachers. We want to thank the volunteers and organizers of this year’s conference, as well as Stanford Taiko, for hosting.

Our year ended with our twelfth annual Spring Concert, “Star-Chu Valley.” Each member had prepared for this concert for many weeks, and all enjoyed the final product. We drew in a staggering crowd of 300 people, many of whom were family and friends. Thank you to everyone who came to our concert to support us! Our club is not the same without you.

We are very proud of all of our members, returning and new, for their incredible work this 2024-2025 school year. We also want to recognize our officers this past year for their hard work and dedication to operating the club and organizing all of our events and performances. Thank you to Bill Baxter, Lily Lockwood, Jennifer Stump, Toan Tran, Dustin Kurtz, Sylvie Lausier, Ace DeTurk, and Ollie Chiang for all your hard work as club officers. We are grateful for your dedication to this community. 

We look forward to the opportunities the 2025-2026 school year has for our club! 

In Autumn of 2023 at our annual fall workshop, Taiko Kai welcomed Generation 11 of the club with an astounding 22 members, the most we’ve seen for an incoming generation! With our new performing members, we participated in several events here at UW, which included Timeless Taiwan, NSU Day of Remembrance, CSA Lunar New Year Gala, Tateuchi East Asia Library Opening Ceremony, Cherry Blossom Run, and Husky Giving Day. Outside of UW, we’ve also performed for Sakura-Con, CulturalFest, and the grand opening of Uniqlo at the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood. In May, many of our club members participated in the 30th annual Intercollegiate Taiko Invitational (ITI) at the University of Oregon. We want to give a warm thank you to Ahiru Daiko for hosting the event this year, as well as to all other coordinators and volunteers for their help in making this possible. It’s been a busy year for events and performances. Yet, every performing member dedicated their time to each one the best they possibly could!

We’ve also been lucky enough to have the amazing Shoji Kameda volunteer his time in the autumn and winter quarters to host workshops and practices to further teach our club members about basic taiko forms and drills. Taiko Kai was also fortunate enough to perform at his panel and concert which he hosted here in Seattle. Thank you immensely for all your insights and thoughtful critiques, Sensei!

We ended the school year with our sixth annual Spring Concert, “Nin-Taiko Sports.” All the performing members worked hard to put this performance together, which took several months of organizing and consistent practices to prepare for. For Generation 11, this was their very first concert to organize and perform at, and every single member did wonderfully! Through long rehearsals that carried on through midterms and finals, every person did their best to make the concert the absolute best it could be. Additionally, we want to give a huge shoutout and thank you to Daichi no Kai for performing their own set at our concert, and for allowing many of our members to learn and perform their original song, “Daichi,” along with them. We also want to recognize Dekoboko Taiko and Ogden Buddhist Taiko for their assistance with organizing the concert and performing with us as well. Lastly, we want to thank all the families, friends, and audience members who came to support us. Our concert, and our club as a whole, would not be the same without you. 

We are very proud of every single one of our members for their incredible work this 2023-2024 school year, and for continuing the legacy of this club for eleven whole years. We also thank our officer team this past year—Jason Aochi, Noa Roth, Jennifer Stump, Kanon Morikawa, Bill Baxter, Mora Morales, Kristine Chang, and Luke Dutta—for all the hard work they’ve done this year to keep the club running smoothly and a welcoming environment to all. We hope to see our club expand even more this school year and to make even more happy memories for years to come. Let the 2024-2025 school year commence!

2023 Newsletter

Summer is coming to an end, and so is our wild 10th year of Taiko Kai. As we begin to welcome the new 11th generation of the club, we'd like to look back on all the accomplishments, fantastic events, and spectacular performances we took part in over the past year.

With remote learning now over, in Autumn of 2022 we welcomed 13 new performing members, which took our club to a grand total of 28. With these members we performed all across the greater Seattle area. Some noteworthy performances were for Kubota Garden's Summer Thunder, Seijin-shiki USA, Sakuracon, and FIUTS's CulturalFest at Benaroya Hall. Back on UW campus we also played for the Seattle Cherry Blossom Run, the Japanese Student Association's Matsuri, and many more student-led organizations. In May our members travelled to the University of California, Davis for the Intercollegiate Taiko Invitational, to learn directly from taiko professionals and play with the other college groups along the West Coast. It's been a busy year for Taiko Kai!

2023's Spring Concert, "Journey Through Ji-Bli" was Taiko Kai's largest performance ever, with over 60 performers and 300 attendees. Through this concert we celebrated Taiko Kai's 10th anniversary, and with a bang! We had a wonderful time performing our skits and songs together with so many taiko players from all around the Pacific Northwest. We are grateful to Seattle University's Hidaka Taiko and Taiko Kai's alumni for playing with us and making a concert of this scale possible. We'd also like to give a special thanks to founding member Kim Matsudaira for coming and speaking to kick off the concert. We couldn't have asked for a better 10th anniversary.

We'd like to further recognize all the people who supported Taiko Kai throughout the last year. Thank you to our friends and family, Taiko Kai alumni, the Ethnic Cultural Center, and everyone who came to watch our performances. We also couldn't have done it without the help of our hardworking 2022-2023 officer team: Noa, Anna, Jason C, Asa, Lily, Jason A, Kaila, and Jennifer. Between practices, bonding events, and performances, this past year has been a blast for the club, and we're looking forward to another year of even more excitement. We're committed to continue training to improve our skill and providing quality taiko performances while having a great time. Come check us out in 2024!

Interested in becoming part of our community? 

 Check us out at UW’s RSO Fair on Friday, September 30th, and sign up to come to our yearly fall workshop in the Central Plaza Parking Garage on 10/8 at 2:30 pm!  https://forms.gle/5iDpNdp9sLn3EfHH7 or join our discord!  https://discord.gg/t6m9JSg3px

With in-person practices came in-person bonding events! Outside of practices and performances we got to know our fellow club members during bowling, rock-climbing, swimming, and ice-skating trips- not to mention near-weekly boba excursions after practice. It was a great time building our community and making friends and we’re excited for even more bonding activities next year! 

  Starting in April we began getting ready for our 2022 spring showcase. Every member of our club worked hard and contributed to the successful execution of our Avatar-themed Spring Concert, Avatar: the Last Airdrummer! On May 1st we performed for an audience of almost 300 people in Kane hall. This was the first live spring concert for all but 2 of our members and from soloing to playing percussion to performing some very funny skits, we had an amazing time making this one of our most enjoyable performances of the year! We were also very grateful for the support of our stage manager, Kelsey Kua, and all our volunteers who made the performance possible. May was a very eventful month for Taiko Kai– following our spring concert we performed at UW’s Japanese Student Association’s Matsuri. We also participated in the ECC’s CCCI walk, performed at the ECC Gala and the U-District street fair.