Junji Koyama's Unique Talent for Creating Wind Instruments from Vegetables

Junji Koyama is a teacher for younger grades, who believes in not only educating children but also entertaining them. He has been running a YouTube channel for 11 years now, where he creates wind musical instruments using vegetables and fruits. This is not just a passing idea, but a dedication to the cause. Junji disregarded his parents' advice to not play with his food and started specializing in vegetable ocarinas, using bananas and broccoli.

Apart from his fun-loving nature, Junji has an exceptional talent in creating instruments that hold good harmonic tuning and produce voluminous sounds. He even ventured to make a pan flute, which is made of carrots and celery.



The majority of his vegetable instruments are ocarinas. We provide easy sheet music for both 4 and 6 hole ocarinas that you can create yourself using a carrot like Junji, or purchase a finished product on Amazon or at your local handmade festival.

An ocarina can also be made from a banana.

Here is "Home, Sweet Home" on his Kintoki's carrot recorder, and his recorder made of cucumber.

Junji took it a step further and combined these vegetables to form an impressive quartet of vegetables, consisting of a carrot, potato, broccoli, and Japanese radish.  He even created more complex instruments, such as a trumpet. If you decide to make one, you will need the fingering chart for your trumpet, and here it is.

According to him, he spends up to an hour searching through the local market for vegetables that have a suitable shape to carve into musical instruments. At the end of each recital, he usually eats his creations.