Word: samisens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years. Tipsy politicians and businessmen play such children's games as "scissors, paper, rock" or the passing of lighted tapers until they go out, to determine who must drink penalty cups of sake. When not being pinched or fondled by male guests, the modern geisha sings, plays the samisen or unexpectedly breaks into a rumba, spins a Hula Hoop or blows a saxophone...
...boss of the approaching wagon train is understandably puzzled. He rides up to investigate. Just as he is about to tug at the wagon's flap, he hears a strange whirring. He pulls back just in time to escape the downward thrust of a thin-bladed sword. A samisen twangs weirdly on the sound track and a mustachioed Japanese samurai, complete with formal helmet and robe, emerges into the prairie glare...
...like old times in the famed wooden geisha houses along the river Sumida. A geisha party before the war meant soft lights from many-colored lanterns, the tinkle of the samisen, a mossy garden with elegant dollhouse trees, a banquet starting with pickled sea-urchin eggs, dried seaweed, bonito entrails, mushrooms, and cuttlefish served with maple leaves and chrysanthemums. Above all, it meant the geisha girls themselves, in lacquered wigs and colorful kimonos, who poured sake from porcelain vases, performed their slow and discreet dances, and sang their sad, seductive love invitations...
...recorded Pygmies in the Middle Congo, basket weavers in France, geishas in Japan, Saturday night warblers in English pubs (but avoided Wales, which is "a tragedy; everything is Methodist hymns and Handel"). He has mapped the world folk-song families, found surprising links between them. The pinch-voiced, samisen-playing geisha finds an echo in the Spanish mountain-farm laborer thumping a ximbomba drum; "the lonesome, death-ridden American cowboy is a blood cousin to the raga singer in India...
...standards in democratic Japan, the tightly cocooned and tradition-encrusted world of the geisha (whose name means literally "person of art") has undergone some drastic changes and constantly faces the threat of more. A good geisha today must be able to play not only the ancient mandolin-like samisen and the plaintive flute but an adequate 18 holes of golf as well, in case her patron wishes her to accompany him on a country-club weekend. She should be able to discuss not only the classic poets but also atomic energy, a subject now taught at the geisha academy...