At the moment, Yamato is divided for two separate overseas tours. One group has been in Mexico since February. They are in the middle of a strenuous two-concert-a-day tour.
Today our second group departed and arrived in Adelaide, Australia. It’s actually Yamato’s first trip to Australia. We have been invited to perform at a festival called “WOMadelaide”.
This is a big festival with artists invited from all over the world. It is a ten day program filled with exciting performances and workshops.

Today is the day we moved our drums to the concert venue, but we could not get into the concert hall … we have to wait … which means … today is a day off!

Today we went to an elementary school for a workshop.
At this school, they had their own taiko group named Himawari Taiko. Before the workshop they performed for us. We were very surprised because we were expecting kids who had never played taiko before. It made us really happy to see children playing Japanese taiko on our very first visit to Australia!
When we first began the workshop, the children were a little shy to talk, but as soon as we began playing the drums, there was an explosion of energy! “Yoisa!” “Seiya!” their voices came through loud and clear with smiles on their faces as they played the drums. It seemed that even the children who hadn’t played taiko before were able to enjoy themselves. I bet the members of Himawari Taiko will grow!

Today we had our opening performance at the WOMadelaide Festival. Yamato had a one hour set.
The festival’s opening act started at 6;15 PM. The sun was still shining bright at this time and it was quite hot.
As soon as Yamato’s performance began, the sound of the taiko drums began to attract the festival goers and the audience began to grow. The large area was soon filled to the brim.
Taking power from the encouraging shouts of the audience we put more and more energy into our performance. We played full on from the first number. Actually, we were a bit concerned that our endurance would hold out till the end of the program… One hour under the sun. Even though we were out of breath, we were able to hold on to our power until the end of the show!
Thank you to the audience who sat under the hot sun for the whole performance!
We have two more performances at this festival. Tomorrow we perform at 2 PM.

Wow! When we saw the paper at the hotel this morning, we were in it! It’s a huge picture! Ha ha ha B the way, It’s a close up of Miyazaki Mika. Mr. Cameraman, you have good taste!
So, today is our second concert. It is from 2:00 this afternoon. Adelaide is sunny today. Sunny and blue skies, it is great weather! From the stage there are people as far as we can see! So many people we can’t even describe it with words. I wonder how many people are actually here. From the stage it looks like it might be 4000 – 5000 people…
It is really hot! We can see the heat waves rising over the heads of the audience. The heat translated into an explosive performance. After the encore, it was quite a sight to see the audience standing, enthusiastically clapping with both hands in the air. It was overwhelming!

After the concert, as we were walking around the grounds, many people said to us: Great job! We really enjoyed it! You gave us power! It really makes us happy to hear such words directly. Those words of encouragement are like rejuvenating vitamins to our tired bodies. Thank you. We are very grateful.

Today’s plans are an afternoon workshop and then at 8:30 PM we will make a presentation about hand rolled sushi for an event called “Taste of the World”.

We’ll start with the workshop. We have to teach taiko to the large group that has assembled in front of the stage in English! We begin with introducing the different types of drums and how they are made. After that, using the drums we demonstrate how we remember the rhythms. All at once, they rushed to try out the drums and the sounds of drums and people enjoying themselves filled the air.

Then on to our evening presentation, “Taste of the World”. This is where artists participating in this festival have a chance to present some cuisine from their own country.

The audience asks all kinds of questions about the performances, the instruments, the cuisine and just general questions about the countries. Since Yamato is from Japan, we thought that sushi would be the best food to represent our country. These days sushi is enjoying popularity all over the world. Here in Australia we can even see sushi shops.

Yamato makes the hand rolled sushi while using whatever ingredients we like. As we do the preparations, we season the ingredients and explain the steps for making sushi.

Well, well, today is our last performance. We opened the festival and then had a concert in the middle of the day. Now we are honored to help close it out as one of the last performers.

A light rain was waiting to meet us. We worried that the audience would not come out in the rain, but we didn’t need to worry. Around our start time the front of the stage was swarming with people. How many? Thousands!

This is our third performance since we arrived here, but we were able to get into it even more than our first or second performances. Our first experience in Australia.

No regrets, playing full on, we performed with all our energy in the hopes that we would be invited back to Australia again.

The last encore was really intense!
Everyone who stayed to watch our performance to the end, and all of our staff, thank you for making this a success!

Bye bye Koalas.
Bye bye Kangaroos.
…
Actually, we didn’t see either of them…