NW26 Tradition | Hayashi Concert Featuring Grand Master Kisaku Katada IV Held at Rafu Chuo Gakuen School as a Nisei Week Affiliate Event | August 23, 2026
On August 23, 2026, Fuji Japanese Music, Inc. presented a hayashi concert at Rafu Chuo Gakuen in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles as an affiliate event of Nisei Week. The roughly two-hour program began at 11:30 a.m. and featured Grand Master Kisaku Katada IV, a leading figure in hayashi music visiting from Japan, with Noriko Imura serving as emcee.
The program included the nagauta pieces “Hinazuru Sanbaso,” “Fuji Musume,” “Echigo Jishi,” and “Tsurukame,” the Yamatogaku piece “Ayame,” and a hayashi demonstration.
Kisaku Katada IV is the second son of the late Kisaku Katada III, a Living National Treasure who, beginning with the opening of the Japan America Theatre (currently Aratani Theatre) in Little Tokyo in 1983, energized Los Angeles’s traditional Japanese music community for more than two decades. Kisaku IV succeeded to the fourth-generation Katada Kisaku name in 2025. Shortly before that, performing under the name Katada Shinjuro, he was known for playing the kotsuzumi (hand drum) in the film “KOKUHO.”
The lively program — the first full-scale hayashi concert in some time — also included a hayashi demonstration, in which Katada Kisaku IV explained and showed how the kotsuzumi, okawa, and taiko are built and played. He then used the odaiko, together with shamisen and nokan (flute), to evoke the sounds of waves, water, wind, rain, and snow, concluding with “doro,” the music that accompanies the appearance of a ghost. Each scene was paired with dance interpretation by the Bando Hiromiya dance troupe, giving the audience an unusual and enjoyable interlude between musical numbers.
The tightly coordinated shamisen, vocal, and hayashi performance made for a rare, full-scale hayashi concert, and the audience appeared to thoroughly enjoy the occasion. Building on this concert, Fuji Japanese Music, Inc. is already planning an even richer program for next year’s Nisei Week, including a piece to be performed by male musicians only.