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TI: So we have sort of the, the music side where you've shared and, and brought this collective process. How about organizationally? When I think of San Jose Taiko I think of it as, as more of a professional troupe versus, I look at other taiko groups, generally they're volunteer run and they practice when they can, but San Jose Taiko has been able to do something differently. How did that come about?

RH: Well, I guess it was that process, after coming back from Kodo, that I was trying to push the organization to become more concert oriented and then the experience of traveling in Japan, knowing that what we have is something that we should try to work on as a group, and that's when the buy-in kind of happened with our own members, basically. So after that point we decided that, that we wanted to, as San Jose Taiko, really try to do more concert work and those kind of things, but I knew in order to do that that we just couldn't jump from doing part time hobbyists to full time taiko artists with no infrastructure, so we had incorporated a group, actually, much earlier because, with the thought that we wanted to start getting grants. Actually that happened in nineteen, we had started in 1981, '82 to incorporate a group as a nonprofit, and we were trying to get grants, but it was, the roadblocks we were running into in the mid-'80s was that no one knew what taiko was about and they didn't believe, when we were trying to apply for an arts grant, no one believed that we were an art form. So it took a lot of convincing to funders, basically, to educate them that we're a viable art form. And so that was part of our early work also, but fortunately that started turning around for us and we were able to get into some major grant programs that helped launch the group. The state of California had, through the arts council, had what they called a multicultural arts fund, which is sort of an incubator thing for us, and we were able to get into that, and after that the National Endowment for the Arts had also what they called an advancement program, which is, helped kind of lay down a strong business plan for the organization, and we were able to get into that program also, which also had some really significant funding dollars attached to, to that process.

We were told when we entered the NEA advancement program that maybe half of the groups that start that program won't finish and may not even exist afterwards because they decide it's not worth continuing as an organization, and so we were challenged from day one that, we were being told that, being told that we may not have a chance to survive this whole process. And so, and we knew that we were operating on a different style to begin with and that was, that was our challenge because we were being told that we needed to follow this typical kind of symphony model with a large board and all this kind of structure of staffing, whatever and here we're coming out of a community based art form and doing this, so we already knew that working collectively we didn't have that hierarchy structure, we didn't have the one artistic director and that kind of thing. We knew we would have to really think about how to define ourselves and be able to articulate it so we could sell it back to the funders so they could buy it also, and so that was our challenge at that time and we survived that. We were fortunate to survive that. We had to make some modifications, naturally, in order to compromise, but that really kind of set us on the path to look at how we could build ourselves organizationally.

TI: So it, was that a useful process? Do you think you're stronger by, by doing that and in some ways conforming to some of this?

RH: I think it was useful, one, it made us really think about what conforming meant and then we did try to implement certain things, and we found out that really still didn't work for us, so we, it was part of our learning process that, even though so-called professional consultants that supposedly knew how best to run things, were not totally right and that there were other models that could be just as effective and that we were one of those kind of models. And so we really tried to pursue that, just state that, one, we didn't need a large board, we are basically an artist driven collective, so you need to kind of look at how that operates. We're a community-based operation, so that's a real important component that's real different from other art forms, so we're very tied to a specific ethnic community, as far as our roots, and the instrument's very ethnically driven, too. So those were all factors that NEA or any other funders could not get their heads around at the beginning. And now it's changed a lot, but those were the challenges that we had to push early on, to make people understand that.

TI: And that's what kind of strikes me during this interview, was how many places you were sort of the trailblazers and, and the sense of innovation in blending the music, working with other groups, organizationally doing these different things. I look through your things, the use of technology, I mean, you had a website back in 1996 when the web was just, just starting, and where does that innovation come from? It is... it's not necessarily a common thing to see in these community based organizations, to be so innovative trying all these different things, so where did that come from?

RH: Some of it, to me, is we just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and it's not so much we were so brilliant in thinking about it and then planning for it, but --

TI: But, but is that really true? I mean, you think of the other taiko groups who were there before you and who started about the same time, they didn't take this step up in terms of innovating and trying these new things. In fact, if you talk with them they would say, "Well, we watch what San Jose Taiko does," and kind of follow you, so where, where does that come from?

RH: I think we, at least personally, I've always tried to feel that we were trying to be the creator and not be the follower, basically, and so, and we were willing to take the challenge or risk to kind of be out front and in order to create that process. Maybe it's a little bit of the stubbornness that we all had, and that's that, we were willing to kind of take the flack or, or take the failures, because not everything worked, naturally, but to kind of take the risk to go out there and try to do stuff, whether it's musically or organizationally. To be the first to hire on staff to run a taiko group, to organize as a nonprofit, to bring in a board of directors to help run you, to go after grants and try to fund you, to even ask the community to help donate to kind of help sponsor you or even to go after corporate donations to help sponsor what you're doing. To put the group on the road, to even start doing concerts versus what, 'cause they were, our competition really is the Japan-based groups because when we first started it was Kodo and us, basically, doing the concerts actively, just single shows of just taiko with one group. And so that was kind of the challenge for us, to try to match up. And it wasn't, again, that we were trying to copy, but we were just trying to feel that it was very important that we as an Asian American, or Japanese American group were able to create that recognition and that visibility here in the United States. And again, it's not for San Jose Taiko to be the best and top of it all, but to build a larger field in order to create that environment here in the United States, basically.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.