Kimiko Medlock

Kimiko Medlock is currently an MA student in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, specializing in the history of Japanese social liberation movements. She is also tangentially a Japan-relations nonprofit intern in Washington DC, a taiko player, and a member of the Okinawan American Association of New York. 

Updated June 2015

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TAIKOPROJECT in Collaboration with Mexican Folk/Rockers

  • By Kimiko Medlock
  • 21 Aug 2015

TAIKOPROJECT is at it again. The fast-paced, world-class LA taiko group has recently finished a nationwide tour. And now, fresh off the April release of their CD, Our Many Sides, they are busy with a new project. On September 18-19, 2015, they will perform an integrated concert with the Chicano rock band Quetzal at 8 p.m. at the Tateuchi Democracy Forum at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (across the courtyard from the main Japanese American National Museum building).

This will be TAIKOPROJECT’s second collaboration with the Grammy-winning Quetzal. The two groups first fused Japanese American ...

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Nikkei Chronicles #4 — Nikkei Family: Memories, Traditions, and Values

Don’t Worry Be Hapa

  • By Kimiko Medlock
  • 24 Jul 2015

My sisters and I all have the same dry humor and vertically conservative height, but that’s about where our obvious similarities end. We all have the same Sansei Okinawan mother and Southern-ish Florida father, but we’re often told that we don’t look alike. I might describe our general connection growing up with our “Japanese-ness” as tenuous at best. We ate rice with every meal and never failed to bring gifts to friends’ houses. But then we also heard Pidgin and standard English when we visited extended family. Not a Japanese speaker in sight. And we love our ...

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East Coasters on the Taiko Scene

  • By Kimiko Medlock
  • 22 Jun 2015

Discover Nikkei readers may know taiko as an originally Japanese art, heard on obon nights as grandmothers encourage the community to join in a circular dance. Or perhaps they know it in its post-WWII performance variety. The famed Japanese ensemble taiko group Kodo, for example, tours around the world and brings their rhythms and notions of Japanese culture with them wherever they go…or perhaps readers have never heard of taiko.

Japanese drumming has been playing a unifying role in West Coast US Nikkei communities since its post-war migration to North America (see the Discover Nikkei interview with Seiichi Tanaka ...

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