Word: miyoshi
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Head in a Bucket. Miyoshi's rehearsals began in the green hill town of Otaru, on the big northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, high above Otaru Bay. The last of nine children, all two years apart, she grew up in a jampacked household, the family circle swollen by two servants and seven extra boys, all apprentices from her father's thriving iron factory. No one paid much attention to her, Miyoshi remembers. She was too little. But she managed to steal into the neighborhood Kabuki theater, and had money enough for "ice" candy. Today, onstage, she sings...
...brother recognized the little girl's love for music and took her for tap-dancing and harmonica lessons. After a while Miyoshi switched to the mandolin. ("I didn't like mandolin, either. When I didn't like, I quit.") Next came piano. Says Miyoshi: "I just loved any sound that you could do it with instrument...
Most of all, Miyoshi would have liked to make music with her own voice, but that was impossible: she had bad throat trouble. Mornings, when she first woke up, she could barely speak. When she finally got her voice cranked up, it came out lower than any of the other kids'. "Children have such high voice," she remembers wistfully. "They read their lessons together, way up there. And I read my lesson, way down there." Then, one day during music class at school, the teacher heard a new voice and asked in surprise. "Who's that?" Suddenly Miyoshi...
...home she sang incessantly, to the intense irritation of both her mother and father, who disapproved of her fast, American-style tunes (which she picked up from records). So Miyoshi took to walking around the house with a bucket on her head to spare her parents the pain of her songs. After she went to bed, she would duck under her covers and go on singing. When her father refused to buy her a piano, she pasted a pattern of paper keys on the dining-room table and practiced anyway...
Song Is Heart. War came when Miyoshi was 13. After V-J day, when American ships appeared in Otaru Bay, things began to look up again. So did Miyoshi. She looked up at the tall, uniformed foreign sailors and discovered that she liked them. But the discovery was not made without guilt. Miyoshi says: "You can't look at eyes. It's not feminine. You should look down. It's not really insult, it's not pretty." Her English-speaking brother brought three of the Americans to the Umeki home as guests. There were Edward Giannini...