On May 29, 1945, B-29s and P-51s rained 430,000 incendiary bombs on central Yokohama in the space of 68 minutes. The city burned until, two hours after the raid, there was nothing more that could burn. Japan surrendered 10 weeks later, and in September U.S. forces requisitioned the few brick or concrete buildings standing in Yokohama and built on the city's ashes barracks for the 8th Army. The occupiers, large men in neatly pressed uniforms, imperiously rode in jeeps down city streets. They tossed chocolate and chewing gum to urchins, and handed cigarettes to adults. Murderers, robbers, and rapists roamed the streets after dark. Hunger drove Japanese to crime, but some crimes were, in the censorship preempting prose of newspapers, committed by bands of big white and black men—in small vehicles.

In a park in the center of the burnout city a petite girl in a long red dress and with a white ribbon in her hair mounted the stage on the final day of the All Yokohama Entertainment Competition, November 25, 1946. Strumming a ukulele and accompanied by her father's amateur band, she sang a plaintive ballad entitled "Hill in the Rain." The girl, nine years old, not only had mastered the lyrics, but in perfect time with the music gestured with her right hand to the "light on the hill beyond." Her name was Katô Kazue. She had made her debut at the Athens Theater, near her home in Isogo, Yokohama, earlier that year.

Inoue Masao, a judge sitting in the first row, excitedly turned around and spoke to a Kanagawa Shimbun reporter sitting in the next row: "Not only does she sing well, but her stage presence is perfect. If she seriously pursued singing, she could go far in the entertainment world." She did. She began singing boogie-woogie songs à la Kasagi Shizuko at the Yokohama International Theater, which proved a springboard to an invitation to perform at the Nichigeki Theater in Tokyo. She took the stage name Misora Hibari.

In 1949, at the age of 12, three years after her debut, Hibari cut her first record, "Kappa Boogie," the theme song of one of the two films in which she appeared that year. On August 1 she signed an exclusive contract with Columbia Records. Shortly afterwards she was given her first starring role, in Kanashiki Kuchibue ("Plaintive Whistle"). Hibari played an orphan separated from her elder brother by the war. Their sole thread of mutual recognition is the song. Brother hears sister whistling the tune, and siblings are reunited. In a famous scene Hibari, cane in hand, dances to the song in topper and tails.

Musically or lyrically, the song broke no new ground. It was about disappointed love and the anguish of separation, which placed it squarely in the thematic tradition of songs from Taishô (1913-1925) and early Shôwa (1925-89). Tears and rain, resignation, the nighttime setting—the song trotted out all the tropes of the enka, the Japanese torch song. "Kanashiki Kuchibue" was an adult song sung by a child. Which may have partly accounted for its popularity. When Hibari sang "Kanashiki Kuchibue," listeners did not feel the pain of its heartbroken female singer; rather they heard lyrics sung by a 12-year-old. The original recording, from which are absent the posturing and meditative air of Hibari in her later years, offers a haunting listening experience. Over the snap and crackle of the 50-year-old recording, horns blare the theme with a piano thumping out the beat. Now comes Hibari's voice, husky and sensual, but also with a childlike innocence softening the pain and despair of the lyrics.

The film packed theaters. Radio stations played the theme song. People whistled the melody while they worked and sang the tune in streets. Speakers blared the song in shopping arcades. Sales of the 45rpm surpassed 450,000, setting a new postwar record.

But the media and intelligentsia were not always kind to Hibari. At the age of nine, in 1946, she had competed in NHK's Nodo Jiman Amateur Song Contest, success in which was a ticket to a career as a professional singer. An unsuccessful contestant was summarily dismissed by a gong struck in the midst of the first stanza. Hibari sang the first stanza of "Ringo no Uta" (The Apple Song). No gong. She sang the second stanza. Still no gong. She began to sing the third stanza, only to be interrupted: "Wait a minute, please." In reply to her mother's demand for an explanation, a judge said, "A child singing an adult song has a bad influence on society." In other words, Hibari's singing lacked the innocence expected of a nine-year-old.

The poet Satō Hachiro wrote in the Tokyo Times for January 23, 1950, "What I dislike these days is that girl who sings boogie-woogie. Hearing her once is more than enough. I want to scream, 'Begone! Disappear!' She disgusts me. Just what on earth is she? A sort of monster. When I was a boy, I saw the bear woman, spider man, and long-necked monster exhibited at the Kudan Festival. Boogie-woogie reminds me of those monstrosities. Just how does it differ from them?" Satō was not only a poet but also a popular lyricist, with, to his credit, "The Apple Song," which four years earlier NHK's grandees had deemed too adult for rendition by a child. Sato was not alone in his disapproval. The throaty, sensual renditions of popular songs by a child struck some observers as unnatural. It was as if Lolita had been a songstress rather than a seductress.

Age places no limit on genius. Coupled with an extraordinary memory demonstrated from age three, when she had memorized most of the "Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets," the young Hibari had the voice and stage presence of a woman twice her age. Her pitch was perfect. So was her sense of rhythm. Her ability to lengthen or shorten the rhythm according to the melody was the greatest charm of her singing. She was a prodigy. She out-boogied boogiewoogie queen Kasagi Shizuko. The pundits could not accept that.

In 1950, the year after Hibari rose to stardom with Kanashiki Kuchibue, she repeated her film-record success. The film, Tokyo Kid, was about an orphaned shoeshine girl in a bombpocked cityscape, but the theme song, with its bouncy melody, bubbled with optimism and joie de vivre:

The song spoke for the hordes of urchins who chased after jeeps while begging GIs for chewing gum. For kids with empty stomachs, gum was a magic substance-the food that never melted in your mouth however much you chewed.

Like "Tokyo Kid," her other city songs are sunny and light, in contrast to the plaintive strains of such bucolic numbers as "Echigo Shishi no Uta" (Song of the Echigo Lion), "Ano Oka Koete" (Beyond Yonder Hill), "Tsugaru no Furusato" (Tsugaru My Home) and "Izu no Odoriko " (The Izu Dancing Girl). Perhaps the reason was that a new democratic order was being built from the ruins of the cities, while the countryside remained in the grip of a vestigal feudalism.

"Tokyo Kid" put a dream in children's pockets.

And the dream of many girls was to become another Hibari. Child singers came and went. Two who survived the entertainment machine were Yukimura Izumi and Eri Chiemi. In 1955 the two singers teamed up with Hibari to form a singing cinematic trio called the "Three Young Women." Over the next decade Hibari was at the peak of her powers.

The economic expansion beginning in the mid-1950s ushered in the age of television. The box eventually eclipsed the radio and spelled the end of the Golden Age of Japanese Film. Japanese tastes in music diversified. Hibari received less exposure and no longer overwhelmingly dominated the entertainment world.

And her image suffered from some lapses of judgment. The society of dark, naked desire, whose symbol was the black market, gradually gave way to a society of bright civilized appearances. The war and occupation were receding from memory, and for a new generation were history rather than experience. But Hibari and her family doggedly stuck to the old ways. She entrusted security at her concerts to the Yamaguchi yakuza syndicate, and in 1973 it came to light that her brother Katō, who had appeared with her on stage, was connected with the mob. The pundits wrote with poisoned quills, and halls would not book her concerts. The title of her hit song "Kanashii Saké" (Sad Saké, 1966) became emblematic of a besotted life.

Art springs from a variety of motivations—piety, the urge to self-expression, a desire to create beauty Art was for art's sake earlier in this century; art was an end in itself, artists averred. In contrast to art which elicits a tilt of the head and quizzical look is art that engages—music that sets feet atappin', paintings that transfix, poems that encapsulate human experience. Emerson, in his famous letter to Whitman, said of Leaves of Grass, "It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging."

Those were the merits of Misora Hibari's vocal art. She fortified and encouraged her beaten and occupied nation. She symbolized for postwar youth the limitlessness of possiblity. She demonstrated that the dream in the pocket could be large ndeed.

From: "The Ten Most Influential Japanese of the Century." The East, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 54-55.