TAIKO DRUMS (JAPAN)

For the American Cultures badge, we went to a Taiko Drum festival. Scouts attending: David, Elisha, Gabriel, Jordon. David and Elisha also attended Japanese night with their exchange students, who lived with them for ten days.

Elisha says: The Japanese are interesting. We went to see the Taiko Drums. They were very loud. The music was pleasant. There was propaganda thrown in the middle. They made it seem like the internment camps the Japanese went to in WWII were concentration camps. Other than the propaganda, it was good.

I was born in Japan. We have had a lot of Japanese exchange students in our house. Their chicken yakitori is delicious. At Japanese night, we played some of their traditional games including a ball on a stick.

Both men and women wear kimonos. It's like a robe or a tunic. They eat sushi and yakisoba. That's a picture of me and Kaho doing origami together. Origami is a paper folding art. I'm pretty good at it.

David says: The Drum concert was fun. It was nice. They played Taiko drums; one big one and three small ones. Taiko drums are the big kettle drums hit with a stick. They also had wind chimes. They didn't talk about history (except for WWII), but I listened to it in song.

At Japanese night with our exchange students, they dressed me in a kimono. I wrote my name in Hiragana. We played with Japanese toys, like a ball on a stick.

Japanese people are a lot quieter than Americans. They love baseball. The photo is Rina teaching me how to paint my name in Hirigana.

What I remember from living in Japan was that there was a lot more advertising on the walls and the street than in the USA. It was very crowded. I had a friend named Hibiki. I didn't speak very much Japanese and he didn't speak very much English. I went to the Tama Zoo and it was great.