One with the drum

Rev. TOM KURAI doesn’t make a lot of noise about his work, but he makes a lot of noise in his work. The soft-spoken, genial abbot of the Sozenji Zen Buddhist Temple in Montebello ministers with a drum. He spreads the rhythmic word.

The roly-poly, the svelte, the young, the elderly, the insecure, the developmentally disabled, the deaf, the blind, even the limbless -- when Kurai sees them, he sees only ... taiko drum players.

“Whether you are a normal person or you have a disability, everyone has ki [chi in Chinese],” he said. “The students respond, they smile, they sing, they move their body. Their brain is working. That is a lot.”

Kurai is one of the premier virtuosos of the taiko -- fat Japanese drums of various sizes struck with large, thick sticks -- and master of traditional Japanese percussion in the United States. If you haven’t heard of him, you might have heard him -- most recently thundering away during the battle sequences of “The Last Samurai.” All in all, he’s not something you might expect from the follower of a religion associated with concentration and silence. And yet Zen principle applies.

“It’s through the doing,” Kurai explained. “You really forget your self. The activity and the person become one. There is no separation. So the doing becomes the person. That’s the practice.”

Rev. Tom, as he’s known, is also founder of the Taiko Center of Los Angeles, a school that caters not to steel-muscled demon drummers in breechcloths but to ... anyone. His TCLA brainchild, Satori Daiko -- composed almost entirely of women, including mothers and daughters -- is one of the hot taiko bands in town, having performed at the Japan America Theater in Los Angeles and Sado Island in Japan (where the famed taiko group Kodo holds an annual Earth celebration) and this August debuting on the Ford Theater subscription in tandem with Rei Aoo’s Dance Planet. (Kurai, also a taiko composer and innovator, loves to combine the drums with everything from Javanese gamelan to tap-dancing.)

But these are just a few beats in his overall rhythm.

In any given week, the peripatetic priest might be at UC Riverside teaching the country’s only for-credit taiko class, delighting fifth-graders at Mountain View Elementary in Tujunga, playing a noon concert at idyllic Pepperdine University in Malibu, letting sunbaked students at Calabasas High School try their hands at baci (sticks), pounding away at Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester, teaching psychiatric patients at Patton State Hospital, holding TCLA classes at Sozenji Temple -- while tending to the full-time demands of running the temple. His vanful of drums essentially lives on the freeway. Does he sleep?

“Four or five hours a night,” Kurai said with a chuckle, spreading peanut butter on toast for a quick breakfast at home in Monterey Park. “I always wanted to play the drums, as far back as I can remember. I was always banging on things and tapping to music on the radio. I would play with my chopsticks -- my hashi.”

And get scolded?

“At the dinner table, yes,” he laughed. “I always had drumming in me.”

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A universally accessible experience

Now he tries to instill it in others -- any others. Think taiko and you tend to think of men hitting enormous drums with force and discipline -- but this is equal-opportunity drumming. Rev. Tom, whose approach is inspired by the gentle movements of Japanese folkloric dance, stressing a fluidity of motion, vowed to teach anyone, “even if they had one arm.” To his amazement, it came to that when he was an artist in residence at Widney High School for severely disabled students, near downtown.

“It turns out that I actually went to a place where some people had no arms or no limbs,” he said. “At first I was very challenged.... A person doesn’t necessarily have to physically pick up the tools to perform, but to be affected by the sound of the taiko is a benefit as well. Some children were quadriplegic and couldn’t even hold a stick, yet they would get close to the drum and feel the vibration. And there were also deaf and blind children. They smiled, and they moved their bodies. The effect of the drum, especially one that is not synthetic ... strikes a very primal chord in people and has a healing effect.”

Healing is the goal among the staff at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, where Kurai instructs the criminally insane. On one recent morning he led a group of inmates in meditation and Japanese drum terminology and then spent the better part of an hour trying to teach a simple four-beat pattern. When the students finally mastered the beat, there was a spontaneous eruption of joy and pride.

“What matters is that there is some social aspect,” said Patton Assistant Chief of Operations Kevin Garland. “Just to have patients come together, sit together, and do an activity together. It is incredibly successful in their self-esteem and their ability to think beyond themselves. What Tom does that makes this so incredibly successful is the idea of having a thought -- one common thought -- and turning it into a physical activity.”

Strangely enough, the 56-year-old Kurai never set out to be a drummer or a priest. He was a hobbyist taiko player in the ‘70s (jamming to Cream and Jimi Hendrix), joining L.A.’s seminal taiko group, Kinnara, at Senshin Temple downtown, but his bio is all over the map: an American kid who grew up in predominantly Latino Boyle Heights in the ‘50s and ‘60s, watching Captain Kangaroo and collecting comics, graduating from Garfield High; a Japanese kid who spent his first five years in the Mie Prefecture of Japan; a veteran of the U.S. Army, drafted during the Vietnam War and serving his tour in Germany; a divorced father of one who returned to Japan at age 31 to study his heritage and find himself; a onetime architecture student; holder of a degree in park administration from Cal Poly Pomona; executive with Sharp and Fuji Film; director of the Japanese American National Museum; longtime Japanese American community activist; Zen priest who completed rigorous ascetic training at Sojiji Monastery in Yokohama, Japan. And along the way, drumming, always drumming.

He was drafted by the Sozenji congregation to take over the temple following the 1986 death of his father, who had founded it in 1971. At first Kurai took “normal jobs” to supplement his meager temple income, but the drum always beckoned, and as students flooded in, he was finally able to merge his musical calling with his spiritual career.

“The philosophical aspect is my background as a Zen priest,” said Kurai. “When you play taiko, you’re not a person here drumming on a drum, but you’re expressing your true self through the medium of the taiko. So the sound of the taiko is not the sound of the taiko but actually yourself. It’s you. So you’re sharing your spirit with others by playing the taiko. This represents the unity between the self and the taiko and the sound and also the listener. There is no separation between all of those units. This is how I think, and this is how I try to teach.”

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Information about Satori Daiko performances is at www.taikocenter.com.