When I first began playing taiko three years ago, the drum beat felt like an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. I began to understand why after my mother told me that when my parents were first married and living in Ota, Japan, they rented an apartment behind a taiko-ya (store). For the first two years of my life I absorbed the activities of taiko making - the rhythm of woodworking, the smell of rawhide, the music of the finished drums.

Taiko has come full circle in my life.