Drumming up a message of faith

Many churches will mark Easter today with full-voiced choirs, brass ensembles and mighty organs, but a church in Little Tokyo will celebrate the holiest day on the Christian calendar with a thundering roar of drums.

“We call it ‘Easter awakening,’ ” said the Rev. Mark Nakagawa, senior pastor at Centenary United Methodist Church. The church’s tradition, which Nakagawa began when he took over the historic Japanese American congregation in 2000, blends a Christian service with Japanese taiko drumming.

“We definitely wake people up,” said Marilyn Nobori, a member of the taiko group Chikara, meaning strength in Japanese. “The old people turn down their hearing aids.”

Nakagawa is a third-generation Japanese American who believes culture and spirituality are inextricably linked. Chikara’s loud rendition of a Resurrection Day prelude and postlude never fails to elicit prolonged applause, and Nakagawa said it is biblically and culturally relevant to incorporate taiko music into an Easter Sunday worship.

“Easter is the resurrection of Jesus -- waking up from sleep,” he said. “The taiko has been a musical instrument of peasants in Japan. Since most issei [first generation] who came to America were from the peasant class -- and some of them started Japanese American churches -- taiko drumming has its place in a Japanese American Christian church.”

The drumming tradition, known as both taiko and daiko, goes back many centuries. Large drums were used to scare the enemy on battlefields and were incorporated into court music and religious rites.

In North America, taiko as a performance music began during the Asian American movement of the late 1960s as a way for sanseis, third-generation Japanese Americans, to reclaim their cultural and political identity. Many taiko groups started in Buddhist temples.

Chikara, an integral part of Centenary’s ministry, aims to connect with people of all ages, cultures and faiths -- one drumbeat at a time.

The group plays near and far at many venues: houses of worship, schools, conventions and community events, including the annual Alive & Running for Suicide Prevention 5K/10K -- sponsored by the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center -- that draws thousands of runners.

Chikara doesn’t charge for a performance, but organizations that invite the group sometimes give an honorarium or take up a collection to help defray expenses.

Next month, Chikara will play in Texas, where 1,000 United Methodist Church leaders from around the world will meet for a weeklong General Conference, the top policy-making body of the 12-million-member United Methodist Church. The church is the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States with 8.1 million members.

Volunteers from Centenary will drive 20 hours to transport the big drums to the conference in Fort Worth.

Chikara began in 1996 to coincide with the church’s centennial celebration. Its 11 core members range in age from 16 to the late 50s.

The youngest, 16-year-old Walter Nishinaka, who has been with the group since he was 4, calls Chikara “my other family.”

He won’t be going to Fort Worth because he wants to maintain his perfect attendance record at Benjamin Franklin High School in Highland Park, where he is a junior.

“It’s just bad timing,” Walter said. “I’d love to go, but school comes first.”

The group’s vision is using the music to be God’s ambassadors of love, goodwill and understanding. Though based at Centenary, Chikara is open to people outside the church. Two drummers are Buddhists.

“Drumbeat is like the heartbeat, which is universal,” said Brian Kurushima, leader of Chikara.

“Taiko is primal,” he said. “You not only hear taiko but you feel it. People come up to us and say they feel it not only in their gut, but they feel it in their feet, in their soul and in their heart.”

Once, while the group was playing at a Tongan church in Santa Ana, a woman in the audience became so enchanted that she came up, picked up the drum that Kurushima was playing and carried it around. Without missing a beat, he continued to play while following her about the church.

Chikara receives more invitations than it can handle. Where to perform is a group decision, based on how many players are available. One weekend, Chikara did five venues: two churches, two bazaars and a meeting of the League of Women Voters. The entire group will play at today’s 10:45 a.m. service.

Chikara’s mission statement comes straight out of Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about different spiritual gifts.

“We work to achieve a group, like the body God has created, ‘giving greater honor to the weaker members, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another,’ ” the mission statement states. “ ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.’ ”

Chikara’s charter members were trained by the best: Kinnara Taiko, Southern California’s oldest taiko team, founded in 1969 by members of the Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles.

Taiko is taught orally -- in an old-fashioned way, Nobori said.

For example, don means a hit on the drum head with bachi (drum sticks), while ka represents a hit on the rim (the wooden part of the drum), and mah signals a break or hesitation, she explained. So a teacher or leader might call out a pattern of dons and kas, for example, don, don, don, ka.

Members of Chikara make their own drums and stage attire.

It costs about $500 to make a drum out of a wine barrel. A comparable one from Japan would run $3,000 or more.

They also “reskin” their drums, sanding and revarnishing them. To soften steer skin, they soak it in the children’s pool at the church compound.

Members enjoy not only making music together, but also making drums together.

“Taiko is fun. That’s the bottom line,” Nobori said. “We’re a community; we’re part of the church, a greater community and the taiko community.

“In taiko they talk about the spirit of the drum. In Christianity, we talk about the Holy Spirit. It just meshes so well.”

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connie.kang@latimes.com