Music: Japan’s Big Apple

From Yokohama to Nagasaki, Japanese last week hummed, whistled and sang Ringo No Uta (The Song of the Apple). It was Japan’s first big sentimental song hit since 1941, when Japanese music went martial. Tokyo’s radio station JOAK got 100 requests a day for it. It had sold 200,000 phonograph records and 50,000 copies of sheet music, and would have sold more if its publishers had had the materials. Even G.I.s hummed it. Apple’s lyrics, translated:

I bring close my lips And the blue sky quietly looks on. Though the apple says nothing, I know well how she feels. She is lovely—lovely little apple. . . .

Unlike Japan’s prewar popular songs, which were languidly minor key and stickily sentimental, Song of the Apple was as sprightly as a hit from a U.S. college musical. It was written for Japan’s first postwar movie, Soyokaze (Gentle Breeze), by Hachiro Sato and Tadashi Manjome, the Rodgers & Hammerstein of Japan’s Tin Pan Alley. Lyricist Sato, a paunchy little Jap with a luxuriant ebony mustache, is Japan’s Edgar Guest, turns out 50 homey verses a month for newspapers and radio. He wrote Song of the Apple before breakfast one morning in bed, after deciding that most Japanese were thinking about food these days. He rejected rice as unromantic, chose the apple because it is his favorite fruit.

Last week Sato and Manjome were busy writing a new song. It was titled Lovely, Lovely Sweet Pea.