Since January 2014, the Southern Arizona Japanese Cultural Coalition has been putting on an annual Japanese cultural event in Tucson. It started out as a New Year’s mochi pounding event and has grown into a larger-scale festival with taiko drumming; traditional Japanese dancing; martial arts, archery and sword play demonstrations; origami; takoyaki balls and Asian fusion food; a marketplace with food, ceramic, clothing and craft vendors; chances to try a chess-like game called shogi and a tile game called go; tea ceremonies and ikebana flower arranging.
The Tucson Japanese Festival will be held on Saturday, March 21, at the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center.
The event is organized by a council of about 10 core members.
The coalition partners with the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center. The center usually has Chinese food for sale at the event.
The festival is in its 10th year. It wasn’t held for three years, from 2021 to 2023, due to COVID. When the coalition started it back up in 2024, they moved the festival to March.
This year, Haruki Saito, a deity dancer from Sado Island, Japan, will be coming to perform at the festival. He will wear a mask and perform a dance traditionally done to cleanse and bless homes.
Kay Fukumoto, the co-founder of Maui Taiko, will travel from Hawaii to take part in the festival. She will be performing a Fukushima Ondo obon dance brought over to Maui from Japan.
Members of Odaiko Sonora, a local Tucson taiko group, will accompany Fukumoto.
Carolyn Classen, publicity chair for the Tucson Japanese Festival and one of the founding members of the coalition, said the festival is meant to educate people about different aspects of Japanese culture and to bring people together.
“Everybody who comes is Japanese nationals, Japanese Americans, people interested in our culture or Asian culture…. There’s a steady group of people who are interested in our culture. It brings people together to inform them and just to spread goodwill about who we are,” Classen said.
Classen, who serves as the editor of the coalition’s website, regularly posts about different Japanese cultural events in Southern Arizona.
The coalition held the first mochi pounding event in 2014 at Yume Japanese Gardens.
The event has also been held at Odaiko Sonora’s studio and Pima Community College over the years.
Mochi pounding continues to be a part of the festival. It is traditionally done during New Year’s celebrations.
Mochi pounding involves pounding rice with a wood mallet, known as a kine, into a mortar, or a usu.
“It’s a family of young men and their friends that pound the mochi. They’re going mash the rice down into a paste, and then another group of people form the paste into these round balls, which we will give out as samples with flavorings,” Classen said.
The first year, the event attracted 200 people. It has grown to around 2,300 attendees.
A number of vendors and cultural groups have been part of the festival for years.
One artist from Pima Community College displays and sells his ceramic raku bowls each year.
Another local vendor brings blue and fabrics tie-dyed fabrics created using a shibori technique.
A number of Arizona organizations, including Phoenix Shogi, the Tucson Go Club, the Sakura Tea Circle and the Tucson Origami Club, help to run activities.
Members of the University of Arizona’s Japanese American Student Association volunteer each year at the festival. They help with serving tea and mochi, picking up trash and giving out information.
The festival helps to raise money for scholarships for University of Arizona students studying abroad in Kyoto, Japan.
This is the fifth year the coalition has given out scholarships.
A committee is choosing two students to receive $500 each, which can be used on books, food, program costs and other expenses.
“That’s been the purpose of keeping the festival running is to give the scholarships to the students and to promote Japanese culture,” Classen said.
Odaiko Sonora has been part of the festival since the beginning. Their director, Karen Falkenstrom, is on the festival’s planning council.
She said before the festival started, there were a number of Japanese and Japanese-American cultural groups in Tucson.
“This has really brought together the diverse communities that are interested in Japanese culture or who have Japanese heritage,” Falkenstrom said.
Odaiko Sonora has operated in Tucson since May 2002. It was co-founded by Falkenstrom and two other women.
Falkenstrom, who is of Korean and Norwegian heritage, grew up in an artistic family. Her dad was a violinist. Her mother was a dancer and singer who performed traditional Korean dance forms and music, along with ballet and opera.
“I was raised with a very musical background. I started playing piano when I was young. I gave the arts up in high school… And then somewhere in my 30s, I discovered the Irish drum. I learned because I played with the Mollys, which was an Irish band… I found taiko in about 2001, after I had spent some time in Korea,” Falkenstrom said.
Falkenstrom helped to start the group when she was still new to taiko.
“We didn’t have any drums or anything back then. We had to learn how to build them and practiced on tires before that…We just loved it so much that we played on tires until we could build the drums,” Falkenstrom said.
Odaiko Sonora offers classes for different levels of students and performs at about 50 events each year, including the All Souls Procession, the Walk to End Alzheimer’s and the Tucson Marathon.
They also offer programs at several elementary schools in Southern Arizona, along with teambuilding activities and interactive lectures.
They operate out of the Rhythm Industry Performance Factory.
Falkenstrom said their students initially get involved and keep doing taiko drumming for different reasons.
“Many people just want it to remain recreational. It’s what they love to do. It’s an activity where they can engage in community, be part of a team and just have fun… There are some people who are really born to perform, or they’ve had experience performing… We find some people stay perennial students. They just keep coming to the all-ages recreational taiko class, which is what we call our beginners class. Some people join the team, which is our Odaiko Sonora community group. Then, some of those people find that they love performing, and they really want to get better at taiko and be able to perform it in front of people. That’s our performing ensemble,” Falkenstrom said.
At the moment, there’s five members in the performing ensemble. The community group has around 20 students.
Students range in age from 8 to their 80s.
During the festival, students at different levels will be performing.
The performing ensemble will be doing a new piece called “Wildflower,” which was written by one of the students.
Each year, the group tries to debut at least one new song from one of the members.
The group also regularly brings in instructors to teach them new songs or skills.
Falkenstrom said taiko is a very athletic artform.
“I like to call it a musical martial art team sport. It has aspects of all of those things…Everybody thinks taiko is all about the drums, but it’s really about voice and movement as much as it is about the drums,” Falkenstrom said.
Odaiko Sonora uses different sizes and types of drums.
“Usually, we will be playing the Nagado Daiko, which are the long-bodied, barrel-shaped taiko drums of different sizes. There’s another very common drum called the Shime Daiko. Traditionally, these drums are small. They’re like a snare drum. They are tied with rope so they can be tuned, which the long-bodied drums can’t… We’re going to be playing the Katsugi Oke Daiko… You can wear it and move around with it. It’s double-headed, very light-weight, so you can dance with it…. We also have drums called Uchiwa Daiko that look like fixed fans,” Falkenstrom said.
Tucson Japanese Festival
WHEN: 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. Saturday, March 21
WHERE: Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, 1288 W. River Road, Tucson
COST: $5 for adults, free for children 5 and under. Parking is limited, and attendees are encouraged to carpool, take rideshares and use public transportation
INFO: southernazjapan.org