Hawaii’s First Lady of Taiko – Chizuko Endo

Chizuko Endo – a pioneer as a woman in the world of Taiko arts who has traveled the globe performing & teaching in addition to raising two sons and co-founding and running the Taiko Center of the Pacific here in Hawaii. In our latest edition of Common Threads, Chizuko shares some of the experiences that shaped her life and set her on the path to a life dedicated to the evolution of modern Taiko as we know it today. 

EM: Where did you grow up and what was your life like?

CE:  I grew up in inner-city Los Angeles and attended very racially-diverse schools. I had a strong foundation in Japanese culture. My mother made flower arrangements, and I took Japanese classical dance and went to Japanese School and the Buddhist Temple on the weekends. So I felt that those Japanese cultural arts were always around me, but I didn’t really realize that they were Japanese. Some words that were part of my language, I didn’t understand that they weren’t English until I was in middle school.

EM:  Did your parents immigrate from Japan to the States or were they born here?

CE: Both my parents were born in the United States. When he was three, my father went back to Japan with his family, and he was educated in Japan through high school. After that, he returned to America with his younger sister, who was also born in the United States. My mother was a Nisei (2nd generation), and she was raised in America. During World War II, my father actually had enlisted for the U.S. Army just a couple months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

My mother’s family was incarcerated during the war. Her father was a community leader. He was president of the Japanese Language School Association, and he was very active in the farming community. At that time, the U.S. government was monitoring all leaders in the Japanese community. As soon as the Pearl Harbor happened, he was picked up the next day at like 3:00 in the morning. They came knocking on the door, and they took my grandfather. The family didn’t know where he was for a couple of weeks, and he was separated from them for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, my father was in the U.S. Army, and his brother was in the Japanese army.

EM:  How did those dynamics play out in the family?

CE:  Well, you know, during those days, there wasn’t much communication. Once you were in a foreign country, it wasn’t possible to telephone each other and letters took a month or so. So I don’t really know what kind of communication there was, but I think it was hard on the family. And my father’s brother was killed in the war.

EM:  How did your father and grandfather re-integrate back into American society after the war? Were they treated differently?

CE: I think it was really hard for them. My grandfather was a successful farmer in central California before being taken by the authorities. The family had to give up everything when they were incarcerated during World War II for being of Japanese ancestry. My grandfather was separated from his wife and children for the duration of the war, so I’m sure it was an adjustment to come back together and start from scratch. My grandmother was legally blind, so my mother became head of the family during the war since my grandfather was separated from the family (sounds like what they are doing now in this country).

They had 5 children, so it was a lot of pressure for my mother to care for everyone. They moved to Denver after being released from the relocation camps and started a grocery store. My grandmother died soon after, so my grandfather was left with 5 children. But he worked hard, returned to central California, and built up a successful farming business again. He was the central figure in our family and a very generous and kind man. I had a great deal of respect for him. In my father’s case, he felt a lot of racial injustice and inequality in the army because he was of Japanese ancestry. He also went to Denver after getting out of the army. He had a contact in Denver and worked at a sake factory. He was really alone because he had no family in the US when he got out of the military.

EM:  How did you feel your upbringing shaped your world perspective?

CE: My junior high school was awesome because there were people of many cultures and colors, and we all got along. When I went away to college in Northern California, there were only about five Asian students, but the largest minority was American Indians, and I felt connected to that community. I got very involved in their philosophy, their culture, their ceremonies, and their shamanism. After college, I was intending to do some kind of work in the Native American community, but after traveling with the interpreter for the Hopi traditional leaders (Hopi is a tribe in Arizona), I changed my direction. While traveling with him, I just felt that I really needed to go back to my own culture and learn from the elders and continue those traditions.

EM:  Is that when you got into Taiko arts?

CE: So, Taiko, as most people know it today, is also called Kumi Daiko, which means group drumming. Actually, this whole art form of group drumming was born around 1951 in Japan. So it’s really quite a new art. Before 1968 there was Taiko in America, but it was not the type of Taiko we know today. Maybe you would hear it at the temple or the shrines, but just very briefly, it was not really a performing art. You would hear it at the Bon Festival, and it was usually an old man who was playing by himself to accompany the dancers.

EM:  I see, so how were you introduced to modern Taiko?

CE: I was in Canada and wanted to connect with some friends in Los Angeles who were going to the Hopi reservation from there, but they would leave in two days. So I drove in my car from Vancouver straight to L.A. (this was before cell phones). By the time I got to the grapevine, which is that hill coming from Hwy 5 into Los Angeles, I started seeing all these wild animals jumping from the bushes onto the road. It was kind of like the animals in the book “Where the Wild Things Are.” Well, I was hallucinating! I drove like mad to get to L.A., but they had already left that morning, so I missed my ride.

Since I had missed my ride to the Hopi reservation, I decided to go to a Bon Festival to see a type of drumming my friends had told me about. They told me how they had been jamming on the drums while putting them away after the Bon Festival, and I thought that sounded interesting. When I saw this group perform, I was immediately blown away. It was the first time I experienced Taiko, and I thought, ‘Wow, I want to do this!’ It actually reminded me a lot of the Native American spirit and their energy, and then, it was also something Japanese. But it was unlike anything Japanese I had ever experienced before.

In Japanese culture, women are usually doing more quiet activities. For example, flower arrangement or the Japanese classical dance, which is what I was exposed to. I had a bit more outward energy, so this really struck a chord with me, and I knew everybody in the group because it took place at the Buddhist temple I had grown up at. Everyone except one person and that was Kenny Endo.

EM:  That’s a great! So the story of how you discovered Taiko is also the story of how you met your future husband?

CE:  Yeah, I went out to eat with everybody after that Obon festival, and Kenny and I got to talking. I was trying to get to the Indian reservation in Arizona, and it turned out that he had lived on an Indian reservation in Arizona during his college days. I had also lived on an Indian reservation in Northern California during my college days. So that’s how our conversation began, and yeah, I met Kenny the same day I met Taiko.

Kenny and Chizuko Endo, co-founders of the Taiko Center of the Pacific, perform together for an audience in Waikiki, HI. (Ronen Zilberman photo HonoluluVibes.com)

EM:  Tell me more about the appeal of Taiko drumming for you.

CE: I had just come out of a strong influence of Native American culture, where the drum was akin to the heartbeat. I was also into mask-making, in college and I was influenced by Native American, Japanese, and Balinese masks. I felt that Taiko had the same kind of power that the mask did. It was commanding, and it just made you pay attention to it.

I also felt that Taiko was something you could communicate with. For me, initially, it was a very spiritual connection to the drum and the power it had to affect people and also rocks, leaves, and plants. I was kind of into that spirit world at that time, and it was something that you could use to communicate with the seen and the unseen worlds.

EM:  Did you consider a different path in life before you dedicated yourself to Taiko arts?

CE:  Well, it was all kind of connected. I was interested in healing arts and not necessarily traditional western medicine. And so the mask making was also kind of in that direction. I mean, the mask could transform people, you know, the mask wearer would transform their spirit and their energy. Taiko is kind of the same thing. It’s used as an instrument to help communicate, they think of it as an instrument used to tell stories.

Originally in Japan, it was used for sending messages to faraway places. For example, to warn the villagers that there was a fire or an attacker, or they needed help. The drum was also used for instilling courage in warriors. During farming, they would use it for chasing insects away because when they beat it, the vibrations would make the locusts fly away. It was used to mimic thunder in times of drought, and if they had a bountiful harvest, they would use a drum in celebration. Of course, it was used in the Bon Festivals. So, I don’t know if you could call that healing, but it had a power that I was very attracted to.

EM:  In many drumming traditions around the world women weren’t allowed to play drums in the past, so I’m curious if as a woman you were ever discouraged from playing Taiko because of your gender?

CE: I was never discouraged. In Japan, during the Edo era, in the 1600s, the geisha women practiced performing arts. They played drums that are part of modern Taiko ensembles like the tsunami, a handheld hourglass drum, and the small shime-daiko. So this was accepted as a type of performing art in that sense but not as the kind of art that we see today.

When I first saw Taiko in 1976, a few women were playing then. I never thought that it was something that a woman couldn’t do. But I did feel that people looked at the women playing and thought they were kind of wild and crazy because, you know, we were yelling and playing really wildly. I felt that it was a new intriguing art people were just becoming introduced to. It was looked upon as something not very feminine and not very woman-like in Japanese culture. But, you know, I’m a third-generation Japanese-American, so I’m a little bit different from the traditional Japanese female image.

EM:  I see a big trend in other types of drumming now where the amount of women playing outnumber the men. Are you seeing a similar trend in the Taiko world?

CE: Yes, I see the same trend in Taiko. In the United States, at least 65 percent of practitioners are women, and I think it’s happening in Japan too. But there’s a very small percentage of them who are professionals and a very small percentage of them who are teachers and instructors. So this is a conversation that has been coming up a lot recently. In 2017, preceding the North American Taiko Conference, there was a gathering of all women taiko-ists, where they started voicing these concerns and issues.

EM:  So those conversations spurred the first all women Taiko event in February 2020 called HerBeat: Taiko Women All-Stars in which you participated. How did it feel for you to be a part of this first ever all-female collaboration?

CE:  It was great. I was very honored to be asked to be a part of such a great opportunity. I thought I should accept this invitation and challenge myself to participate because I’ve never really had time to just focus on my art. I’m always doing all the background administrative stuff and funding and all the office work to make everything run for our Taiko Center of the Pacific school. So this was two weeks where I could really just focus on doing the art.

EM:  What was the most exciting part of that experience for you?

CE: Well, for me, what was really exciting was that they presented one of my compositions that features a mask I made and two dancers. I had two really great performers and drummers to play the dramatic parts. I couldn’t have been any happier with the result of the piece. I wish I could have spent more time like that earlier in my career.

Chizuko Endo of the Taiko Center of the Pacific at Kapiolani Park in Waikiki, HI. (Ronen Zilberman photo HonoluluVibes.com)

EM:  Yes, you’re a mother of two boys, how did becoming a mother affect your Taiko career?

CE: When I first was introduced to Taiko, I soon after also began a relationship with Kenny. He moved to play with a group in San Francisco. I stayed in L.A. for about two years to do a mask project with a theatre group. I refrained from playing Taiko for two years because I wanted to make sure that I played Taiko because I wanted to play and not because he was playing Taiko. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I just wanted to play. So that’s when I moved to play with the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, where Kenny was. After a couple years there we moved to Japan and spent 10 years there.

I was playing Taiko for the first six and a half years while I was in Japan and studying Noh mask carving (the art of traditional Japanese mask-making). And then, as soon as I got pregnant, the Japanese people basically said, “oh, you better stay home and take care of your baby.” After I had kids in Japan, we moved further outside of Tokyo, so it became more difficult for me to participate in those activities. And I pretty much became a housewife and a mother. And that was very isolating. I still wanted to be able to play, but I just wasn’t able to.

Then we decided we wanted to raise our kids in the United States. Kenny got a grant from the East-West Center at UH to do graduate studies, so we decided to move to Hawaii in 1990. In the meantime, I decided to also get my master’s degree in Asian Studies with a focus on Japanese studies. I did my master’s thesis on how females got involved in the Japanese art of Noh mask making.

EM:  You were involved in unconventional careers for a woman yet also juggling the very conventional role of mothering and managing a household. How did you juggle these different roles in your life?

CE: Not easy! I think I’ve always chosen the hard way to do things. I didn’t have a support system in Japan after I had my kids, and then we moved out into the countryside, and there was nobody there to help me. Once we came to Hawaii, again, I had no support system here. I would say that the first 15 to 20 years of being in Hawai’i, my husband was gone over half the year due to work. So I was kind of like a single mom, and it was really challenging. By working at home, I thought that I could be there with my kids instead of finding a babysitter and then going to work. I thought I could be there for them more that way. That meant I was home, and I seemed like I was accessible, but I would be focused on my work all the time, so I actually wasn’t really that accessible. I don’t think that working from home was any easier.

However, since I was not in the Japanese society anymore, I could play Taiko again because society wasn’t restricting me.
So I had the opportunity to start playing again, and I was really happy about that. Still, it was also difficult because I had kids. Some people say they remember me carrying one kid on the front and having another kid strapped to my back while helping out in the Taiko classes or trying to play.

EM:  What advice would you give to other mothers trying to do similar juggling acts?

CE:  Find somebody else to do all the administrative work, it’s worth it! But the best piece of advice that was given to me was to ‘follow your heart’ and I always try to live by that.

EM:  When did you create the Taiko Arts of the Pacific School?

CE: Kenny started teaching Taiko classes at UH in 1991 through Continuing Education. Our classroom was on the first floor of the Music Department. However, our classes started becoming popular, and the number of students began to increase. We outgrew the space there, and in 1994 we started our school.

EM:  Why did you decide to start a school with Kenny instead of focusing on a performing?

CE: It was to continue the art, raise people in the art, develop the art form, and develop new music for the art form. I never saw Taiko groups playing until after I graduated college because it really didn’t exist yet in America at that time. So, yeah, to share this art with kids and give them an opportunity to experience it as they grow up.

Chizuko Endo teaches a taiko class for the deaf in Honolulu, HI. (Ronen Zilberman photo HonoluluVibes.com)

EM:  What are some of the ways you think Taiko benefits the community?

CE: I think many people like the community, the social aspect of it, the group, teamwork. The elderly people who are students have found it amazing because they always wanted to play, but didn’t think that they could. This has allowed them to live out their dream in a way, and it’s also great for the mind to learn something new. When you get older in age, trying to coordinate what’s going on in your head with your hands is challenging, and this helps keep your mind and your body younger.

I’ve also been teaching the deaf for about three years. It’s a different and fantastic experience for them to learn a musical instrument where they can feel the vibrations. Other people on the mainland are working with people who have Parkinson’s and Down’s syndrome and found many positive results. I was in Europe last year and was just blown away at how Taiko is spreading there. People are finding their own voice in Taiko and not necessarily holding onto the traditions from classical or traditional Taiko, but building on them. Some people are working with correctional facilities and hospitals and just expanding the art form.

EM:  What would you still like to accomplish in your career?

CE: We’ve always had a vision to create a Taiko Dojo or center. A place where we could have classes, large classes, and individual practice spaces. Where we could have our Taiko information resources – videotapes, DVD’s, and a music library. Where people could come after school to just hang out and do schoolwork. They could practice or study Taiko by going into this library of resources. Parents could enjoy them too, while their kids are taking classes.

EM:  What do you love most about what you do?

CE:  I think it’s performing. The excitement and the focus and the discipline of being on-stage and doing your art and people watching, you know, it just kind of brings everything together. And that’s a great experience.

EM:  Mahalo Chizuko!

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