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BY: All right. So where we left off in the first part of this interview was talking about your involvement in Japanese American groups and organizations, and you listed off a number of them. And I want to go back and talk about each one. And if you can tell me, for each one of the groups that you mentioned, how you became involved in that group, how long you've been affiliated with that group, and what roles you've played. Okay, so I'll list, we'll go one at a time.

SS: Okay.

BY: So the first one -- and I don't know if these are in chronological order, but I'm going to just start with taiko. So Seattle Kokon Taiko, and then you've become involved with other groups as well.

SS: Yeah. So when I moved to Seattle in 1981 in the fall, I moved here in August, and in fall, September or October, what was then called Seattle Taiko Group, the first taiko group in the city, was having workshops, beginners workshops. So the guy I was staying with was a founding member of Seattle Taiko Group, Bill Blauvelt, so he invited me to come to the workshop which I did. And I really enjoyed it. I had always loved watching taiko, but I had never thought about actually being a performer or playing taiko myself. So ended up joining the group, they had auditions the following month and so I joined the group in I think it was November of '81, and I've been playing taiko ever since. The group has since renamed itself as Seattle Kokon Taiko. In the late '80s, three of us sort of left Seattle Taiko Group to form a smaller group. We were kind of encouraged, inspired by a Vancouver group called Humdrums, now called Uzume Taiko, one of the first professional taiko groups in Canada. And thought we would try to do something similar with a smaller ensemble and doing hopefully more intricate pieces or different types of things with taiko. And we found out that it was really hard. [Laughs] That you had to have a lot more expertise as musicians, and a bigger repertoire in order to make it as a small group. Because when you have a larger group, there's something about having, even if not everyone's a superb player, just having ten, fifteen people on big drums playing together, kind of like a marching band versus four trumpets. Just something impressive about the numbers and the choreography. So we merged with Seattle Taiko Group. Our small group was called Kokon Taiko Ensemble, and the original group was Seattle Taiko Group. So then in 1991, we did a joint season together, and in '92 we merged to form Seattle Kokon Taiko, and I've been part of that ever since.

BY: And then next came Kaze Daiko then?

SS: So, well, chronologically the next thing was the North American Taiko Conference occurred in 1997. And it was sponsored by the Japanese American Community Cultural Center down in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. Duane Ibata, who was the director at the time, said that this was only planned as a one-off thing. But it was really successful, so he said, "Well, if all the taiko groups promise to get together in the meantime, we'll do another one in two years." So I was really inspired by that as were a number of people from Seattle. So I started calling around to the other taiko groups in town, and I think there were six at that point, and said, "Well, we should do a regional taiko gathering. So we started planning that and invited people, groups from Oregon, mainly Portland area and British Columbia, mainly Vancouver groups. And so there were maybe a total of ten or twelve groups, and we had our first regional taiko gathering in 1998. And I became kind of a... the organizing committee in Seattle then continued to meet after that. And we hosted another one in 2000, and then we started rotating between the three cities, Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. But the Seattle group continued to meet on a fairly regular basis and named ourselves Regional Taiko Groups Seattle, so RTG Seattle. So that was the second thing. I also, at about the same time, was invited to become a member of the advisory board of the North American Taiko Conference. So it was basically a committee of taiko players who would advise the JACCC on mainly content for North American Taiko Conference. They joined that in '98 or '99, probably '99, around the time of the second NATC. And then in 2000, one of the groups in Seattle was, Tsunami Taiko was one of the first children's taiko groups in North America, formed in '87, I believe. And the leader was Scott Kamimae, and folks like Tyrone and Garrett Nakawatase and Tiffany Furuta and Kelsey Furuta were among the founding members. So anyway, they had been playing for ten, fifteen years by that time, and by 2000, by twelve years, by 2000. And Scott was having a baby, and so he decided to stop teaching and leading the group. So they had also recruited... Tsunami Taiko had recently recruited a bunch of new members who had only been playing for a year or two. And the senior members of the group, who had been playing for ten or twelve years, figured that they could continue and wanted to continue as their own group and create new material and do things, but they didn't feel qualified or that they had enough energy to sustain a beginners group as well. So the parents wanted them to continue, the kids wanted to continue, so they started looking around for someone else to teach and lead the group. And that group became Kaze Daiko and I got invited to be the leader. So that was in January of 2000 when we officially formed Kaze Daiko.

BY: And then TCA?

SS: And then TCA. So somewhere around 2010, give or take a few years, the JACCC was having difficulty sustaining all their programs and they had to cut back on some of them. And one of them was the NATC, they felt like they couldn't sustain being the fiscal sponsor and providing staffing and a lot of logistical support for the NATC anymore. And so the choice was, well, either we just fold up because you no longer have a fiscal and administrative partner to run it, or we form our own organization to continue the North American Taiko Conference. So we chose the latter thing and formed the Taiko Community Alliance, or TCA. I think that was in 2013 give or take a year. And primarily our goal was to continue the North American Taiko Conference and long term goal was to become a really national or international, because we include Canada, U.S. and Canada. Center for support and development of taiko as an art form, and continued to build community among taiko groups. So I was on the original board, we had developed a board and had a three-year rotating membership, so I was on for three years.

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