When It Comes to Exercise, Practice, Japan’s Kodo Drummers Don’t Miss a Beat

A decade ago, the demon drummers of Sado Island in the Japan Sea whipped their bodies into shape by training for the Boston Marathon with pre-dawn runs along the island’s snowbound roads.

They no longer compete in the streets of Massachusetts. But to keep fit the 23 members of the Kodo drummers’ commune still begin each day at 5:30 a.m. with a bracing 6-mile run.

It kicks off a 12-hour daily regimen of physical training and musical practice, which is the Kodo way of life. (Kodo means “children of the drum.”)

Their energetic displays of drumming fascinated audiences in 39 cities across North America and Europe in 1987 alone.

sh Original Jazz Piece

In New York early in the new year, they are putting themselves on the cutting edge of artistic innovation with their premiere of an original jazz piece by drummer Max Roach.

Stripped down to loincloths during a recent 2-hour concert in Maki, a farming town north of Tokyo, their drum hands flew so fast they became a blur.

To keep up their precision playing, Kodo members--aged 20 to 36--spend hours honing their bodies with hours of deep knee bends and tendon stretches.

There’s more to their drumming than calisthenics. Each Kodo member must be able to dance traditional Japanese steps, play several musical instruments, including the flute, and sing in the voice-breaking pentatonic scales.

sh Unique Artist-Athletes

The end product of Kodo’s rigorous routine is a group of Japanese Renaissance men, artist-athletes of a unique breed.

Critics in New York and Paris have acclaimed Kodo as a living repository of traditional Japanese performance art. But pigtailed manager Atsushi Sugano says he feels uncomfortable with that description.

“What we do isn’t traditional art at all,” Sugano said during a rehearsal. “We study the traditions and bring out something new of ourselves.” In one recent performance, for example, Caribbean steel drums were featured in a duet with a Japanese harp.

Sugano said the group recently turned down a subsidy from a right-wing Japanese nationalist who wanted to showcase Kodo as a representative of pure Japanese culture.

sh Independent Spirit

“You have to realize that there is no such thing as pure Japanese culture. It is and always has been a mixture of cultures stemming from the Asian mainland and points south,” Sugano said. “We have to remain independent of nationalistic types.”

Kodo members live communally. Their current quarters is an old schoolhouse on Sado Island, about 250 miles northwest of Tokyo off the west coast of Japan.

The group is building its own little village, scheduled for completion in August, which will house the Kodo members and visiting musicians.

sh Former Penal Colony

The largely unspoiled Sado Island served for centuries as a penal colony and place of exile for dissident poets and deposed emperors. Warlords sent political prisoners to toil their lives away in the island’s gold and silver mines.

Centuries of playing host to cultural exiles like the great Noh playwright Zeami helped make Sado an artistic treasure house.

This, and Sado’s great natural beauty, drew Kodo founder Toshio Kawauchi to the island in the late 1960s.

Kawauchi, who drowned in an accident last January in the Philippines, broke away from a traditional Sado “demon drummer” troupe in 1971.

sh Egalitarian Spirit

The original seven Kodo members were vegetarians and gained fame by training for the Boston Marathon between gigs.

While still outwardly austere, today’s Kodo encourages more artistic give-and-take among the members than the original group.

The egalitarian spirit prevails in a no-star system too. But while no one gets particular billing, Kodo members certainly get rock star treatment at the stage door.

Muscular dancer-drummer Kazuaki Tomita, 30, sweating rivers after a gut-wrenching stint at the drums, was besieged by squealing female fans pushing autograph books at him after the Maki performance.