Word: americans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...apples, but one night Giannini egged her into trying a song. (At the time, Rodgers and Hammerstein, having triumphed with Oklahoma!, had just opened Carousel.) Miyoshi was still self-conscious because her voice was not the usual high-pitched Japanese voice, but Giannini put her at her ease. "This American man gave me courage," says Miyoshi. "He said, 'Don't feel ashamed of your voice. Song is not only voice; is heart, mind...
Wham! Pearl Harbor. Half the world away from Otaru, in a bumpy California crossroads hamlet called Cressy (pop. 400), chunky little Chiyoko Suzuki began her rehearsals for Flower Drum just 28 years ago. Youngest of a fair-sized Japanese-American family (a brother twelve years older, and two sisters, eight and ten years older), "Chiby" (Squirt) Suzuki was a loner from the start-a kid who seemed to figure she was expected to take care of herself. She went to a two-room schoolhouse, rode horses bareback, learned to swim in irrigation canals on her father's 100-acre...
...singing. She sang her earliest solo at 3½, when she visited a Sunday-school class one Easter and laced into White Lilies with such gusto that the rest of the kids quit to let her go it alone. To everyone in town, Chiby seemed like just another American kid; people began to call her "Pat." At a "couple of county things" she stopped the show with her unbridled rendition of I Am an American...