Craftsmen Building Traditional Taiko Drums

In a wooden workshop marked with banners reading taiko and tradition, a craftsman drives a wooden peg into a barrel-shaped drum shell with a heavy mallet while a second man tightens the rope lacing on a finished drum beside him. A woman in a green robe sorts small parts at a shelf lined with drawers, and behind her a painter kneels at an easel finishing a scroll of cranes over a crashing wave. Rows of taiko drums in red, black, and gold crowd the shelves and hang from the rafters, alongside paper lanterns, coiled rope, and folded cloth in blue and yellow. Vases of pink and blue blossoms brighten the workbench corners. Every drum taking shape here will eventually answer the same mallet, though each shell still carries the particular grain of the tree it came from.