Word: miyoshi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three G.I.s went to the Umeki home almost every night. Usually the plump 16-year-old sat in the background eating 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...
Until the day they left, the G.I.s kept visiting the Umekis with presents-bacon, shaving cream, hair oil. Miyoshi put the hair oil on her face and tried to brush her teeth with the shaving cream, but she knew a gift when...
Strange Custom. Although Miyoshi's friends were gone ("My mother was crying too hard, it broke her heart"), there were still some soldiers left in Otaru, and the shy little girl began to sing with G.I. bands in their service clubs. Once she was paid 300 yen (about 90?) for a night's work. "Old family have strange custom, girl shouldn't work," she says. "I felt bad, because now I'm getting paid, really working. I guess it's too young to get paid. I gave it to my father...
...father he was gone," Miyoshi explains. "I mean, he die. We have little temple in house, and everybody live there, even after die. They always with us. I put money in temple for my father, but my mother said, 'Your father say that it's all right you spend.' So I bought coal for stove...
Whenever there was something special like sweets in the house, it was offered first to the dead in the temple in "God's Room." "We have to leave it with them one day, then we could have it," Miyoshi says. But the hungry girl could not wait a whole day knowing that there was candy in God's Room. She would succumb to temptation and open the temple, despite her fear of ancestral punishment. "I prayed: I have to have this. I got to have this candy. I'm going to take this candy, so please...