Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Zpochen wrote:

Hello everyone.

I am a Finnish exchange student currently living in Sapporo, Japan. I got interested in shakuhachi while I was spending new year at the home of a friend whose father is a musician. Recently my Japanese friends in their endless hospitality bought me a beginners set (complete with a plastic shakuhachi, book and an example cd) as a present for which I'm truly grateful for (these people just keep amazing me). I am currently taking lessons from Sugawara Kuniyoshi 菅原久仁義　-sensei. Unfortunately I am leaving back to Finland in a few months so I am not able to continue these lessons much longer. I'll just have to keep practicing as good as I can.

As for musical backround, I have played various instruments in bands for almost 10 years now but I am definitely not a professional and have never received any musical education of any kind.

If other Finnish shakuhachi players exist in this forum, would you please notify me of yourself?

I'm one of the few finnish people on this forum and most likely the only one who actually lives in Finland right now. There are couple of other finnish players but I think that most - if not all - of them are still beginners. I have met several people here who all had taken some lessons but had not gotten much further than that. I haven't heard of anyone who is aiming higher than just playing for fun. Not surprisingly you will find that many of the people who know what shakuhachi is are also involved in Zen activities. If you ask around in the Helsinki Zen Center you will most likely meet everyone who has trained with Gunnar.

Jone, the person mentioned before, is from here and apparently has taken some amount of lessons. I heard that his other musical work is taking most of his time but that he is pretty much into shakuhachi. I unfortunately haven't met him personally. I did, however, meet a person who knows him.

I'm trying to find people around here who are into this stuff so that we could perhaps get together and maybe even arrange something. Although there are no teachers in Finland, Gunnar Linder lives in Sweden and has given lessons to several people from Finland. He mentioned a while back that if we could get enough people together in here he might be able to stop by occasionally and give lessons. I'm hoping that if we can get enough people together it could be possible to start a small-scale shakuhachi movement in here as well. Currently it's very hard to get started around here and even harder to progress. I've tried to help everyone who has been interested but my resources are very limited. At best I can just point people to the right direction.

As for myself, I've been playing ... uh, I think two years now. It's become so much of a habit that I lost count some time ago. I visit Gunnar as often as I possibly can for lessons. Apart from learning the traditional shakuhachi pieces that way I also practice various japanese pieces on my. My girlfriend sings pretty well and so we try to find all sorts of pieces which have lyrics so that we can practice together. So far I have a small stack of notations for all sorts of pieces that we found interesting. Although my playing is hardly good yet I keep hearing that ear plugs are no longer strictly necessary for the listener.

I'll drop you an e-mail soon.