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Most of all, Miyoshi would have liked to make music with her own voice, but that was impossible: she had bad throat trouble. Mornings, when she first woke up, she could barely speak. When she finally got her voice cranked up, it came out lower than any of the other kids'. "Children have such high voice," she remembers wistfully. "They read their lessons together, way up there. And I read my lesson, way down there." Then, one day during music class at school, the teacher heard a new voice and asked in surprise. "Who's that?" Suddenly Miyoshi Umeki could sing.
At home she sang incessantly, to the intense irritation of both her mother and father, who disapproved of her fast, American-style tunes (which she picked up from records). So Miyoshi took to walking around the house with a bucket on her head to spare her parents the pain of her songs. After she went to bed, she would duck under her covers and go on singing. When her father refused to buy her a piano, she pasted a pattern of paper keys on the dining-room table and practiced anyway.
Song Is Heart. War came when Miyoshi was 13. After V-J day, when American ships appeared in Otaru Bay, things began to look up again. So did Miyoshi. She looked up at the tall, uniformed foreign sailors and discovered that she liked them. But the discovery was not made without guilt. Miyoshi says: "You can't look at eyes. It's not feminine. You should look down. It's not really insult, it's not pretty." Her English-speaking brother brought three of the Americans to the Umeki home as guests. There were Edward Giannini, a clarinet-playing T-4 in the 417th Army Service Forces Band, Sergeant Joseph Bardner, and a third soldier whose name the Umeki family never learned. They knew him as "G Minor" because he always muttered "G minor, G minor" as he played his guitar.
Through the early winter of 1945, the 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 she saw one.
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."