Mambo-San

In the land of Fujiyama, harakiri, paper houses and the ritualized courtesy of the tea ceremony, everybody seemed to be doing the mambo. Big-city dance halls with alternating bands and little village meeting places with borrowed phonographs were rocking each night with shoulder-shaking, hip-writhing youngsters. Tea parlors, coffee shops and bars dispensed their drinks to a rolling mambo beat, and new dance halls were abuilding to cope with the craze.

Japan was spared the mambo until last fall, when touring Bandman Xavier Cugat introduced it. But it did not really catch on until the Japanese saw Jane Russell do the Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White mambo in the film Underwater! In the last two months more than half a million mambo records have been sold, and Japanese recording companies have been working overtime to meet the mamboom. Top hit is still Cherry Pink, followed closely by Skokiaan Mambo and Cerezo Rosa (a different arrangement of Cherry Pink). Local mambo composers are doing their best to catch up.

Parents and educators are inclined to view these un-Japanese gyrations with misgivings and even to take steps. In the city of Fukui (pop. 120,000), for instance, the educators prepared a collection of what they called "good, wholesome, invigorating" songs to be sent out to local education boards and parent-teacher associations, with the recommendation that they be plugged on every possible occasion to drive out the "banal, vulgar, nerve-destroying" mambo. Then the educators rolled up heavy artillery in the form of a symphony orchestra imported from Tokyo. It got a respectful hearing, but this week Cherry Pink and Cerezo Rosa were beating harder than ever against Fukui eardrums. Said one local music critic sadly: "Fukui has 1,000 music lovers and 25,000 mambo fans."

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