Word: samisens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...silken excitement, the geisha padded swiftly into the banquet hall of an exclusive Tokyo restaurant. Some bore samisens; others struck the classical attitudes of a geisha dance on the soft straw mats. Suddenly the samisens began beating it out eight to the bar and one of the girls let go a gully-low bellow that crackled the paper walls. The girls were doing the Samisen Boogie, a red-hot indication of what people meant last week when they said that Japan was jazzu-crazy...
...with his wife, Shelley, spent two Christmases in Japanese concentration camps, expected 15 familyless French, Chinese, British, U.S. and Filipino correspondents to join in. Cabled Correspondent Luter: "After dinner we'll feed the carp in the 100-foot fishpond and sing carols to the accompaniment of a Japanese samisen. It will be an international Christmas in a strangely Oriental setting-but most thoughts will be of home. Cheers...
...Geisha houses, brightly kimonoed girls plucked their banjo-like samisen and trilled sentimental Japanese favorites like the Rain Blues, the Song of Beauty, the Innocence Duet. When a boisterous American asked for the Japanese national anthem, the girls refused but obliged with You Are My Sunshine. Toshiko Yamaguchi, once one of Japan's most popular singers, came home from a Shanghai internment camp with a new repertoire that included Star Dust...
...third and largest network, for general listening, was overhauled from ground to aerial. This included station JOAK (Radio Tokyo), whose 150,000-watt transmitter is one of the world's strongest. Out went the untimed, slipshod samisen strumming; the tedious Kodan-storytelling; the poetry on the co-prosperity sphere. In came popular music (current hit: a romantic tune, Song of the Apple), comedy shows and precisely timed modern, democratic plays (John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln). The most popular storyteller, sad-faced, bowlegged Musei, dropped the tale of Sugato Sanshiro, the legendary judo champ, and picked up the Arabian...