UNDERCURRENTS.

Waikato Times, Volume 113, Issue 18874, 18 February 1933, Page 4

UNDERCURRENTS.

HERE, THERE & EVERYWHERE. (By “ Gleaner.”) CLOSE TO NATURE MUSIC. Sir Harold Boulton's reference m yesterday's Waikato Times .to Maori musio is welcome. If he succeeds in collecting and preserving for posterity genuine Maori tunes he will accomplish something which the Dominion should be grateful for. As well as that the fact of Sir Harold interesting himself will mean that Maori songs will become better known and more appreciated abroad. There is much of plaintive beauty in them which is too good to be lost.

It always seemed to “Gleaner” that the closer a people are to Nature the more plaintive and sad their music. For instance, the music of the British Celts as against that of the more mundane Anglo-Saxon. The French Canadians, dwellers on the land mostly, or spending their lives in forest and lake land, record their feelings in music which shows a yearning for—- “ Gleaner” cannot tell. They seem happy enough, as some of their songs and their lives show, but there Is always that indefinable sadness and plaintive longing for the unexplicable.

It Is the same with others. The saddest music “ Gleaner ” ever heard was at Fernandina, in Florida, where he listened to some negroes singing across the water at St. Mary’s, Georgia. Yet those negroes were supremely happy. Again that yearning after the unknown? • * * • With negroes we have on the other hand, of course, " music ” of absolute degradation, which, in a modified form, is the basis of modern American “jazz.” The difference can only be explained by the mental and physical.

To the ears of white people Chinese music is a nightmare of discordant sounds. To those who understand it and have therefore learnt to appreciate It, it is descriptively more beautiful than our own. By that “ Gleaner" means the interpretation Into music of the sounds of the woods, the birds, the waters. “ Gleaner ” for some time used to live In an old Buddhist monastery on the shores of the fabled West Lake in Hangchow. A blind monk there used to sit for hours in a secluded bamboo grove, his only companion his fiddle. When lie played he played only of the things he could hear, sight being denied him. In his music one could hear the rustle of trees, the tinkle of tiny waterfalls, the twittering of the birds. All these were his friends, and their voices he could express on his beloved fiddle. Then again there was the chanting of the monks in the temple or during their processions. They used high Mandarin, which when chanted resembles nothing so much as chanted Latin, so that the monks at their matins, evensong and other times might have been white brthren. * * * * THE JAPANESE MENACE. The general public are only now being apprised of the potential danger to the Pacific, as,well as the East, Japan’s adventure in Manchuria Is leading to.

The occupation of Manchuria was only the first step In Japan’s polioy of modern Imperialistic expansion. Past history Included the Bonin Islands, Formosa, Korea, the Kwantung Peninsula, Quelpart Island, Port Hamilton (which for a few years was British), Southern Saghalien and several Islands.

• * * • Manchuria has provided Japan with a stepping-stone for continental Asiatic expansion, and the late \var gave Japan the mandate over the German Ladrone and other islands which provides her with an advance post for expansion in the Pacific. She has hungry eves on the Philippines, Borneo, and certain, if not all, of the East Indies. Next in order comes New Guinea and Australia. New Zealand? The Japanese through the frequent visits of their “ training " men-of-war, to our coasts could find their way blindfolded into our principal ports.

Across the Pacific they look with longing to British Columbia, California, and Mexico. Hawaii is just about Japan’s now In everything but name. British Columbia and the Pacific littoral of North America is honeycombed with cadres of Japanese reservists and regulars acting under the guise of peaceful citizens. Japan is thorough. Being thorough she is prepared.

Manchuria may seem to be a far-off place to us In New Zealand, but It Is In reality only across the street in the sequence of events Japan would like to see come about.

New Zealand has a climate and natural resources very much to the liking of the Japanese. In the main they are a people of peasant cultivators and flsherfolk. Their wants are few. Give them a piece of land or a well-found boat with good fishing ground near and they are happy. Vegetables and fish is their daily provider, and New Zealand could give them those in abundance. We cannot give employment to 60,000 of our 1.500,000 inhabitants. Thirty million Japanese could live here without anyone needing to worry about giving them employment. No, Manchuria is not so very far away. * * * * BALD FACTS. “ The worst type of habitual criminal,” according to a Japanese Inquirer who has been studying the prison population of his country for ten years, “is generally bald.” Perhaps that ought to be regarded as yet another incentive lo virtue; the mastererimmal cannot keep his hair on, in spite of all the imaginative fiction which presents the king of the underworld as one who is as cool as a cucumber in all circumstances. Crime U evidently no bed of roses but a highly harassing career; there is nothing like it for bringing a man baldheaded to the gaol.

It should not, however, be hastily assumed that all bald men are necessarily bad lots; Elisha was bald, but in spite of that lamentable little affair about the two she-bears which slew the 12 children who incautiously remarked on the fact he is generally reckoned among the company of the virtue*,:a. Still Ipss should it be assumed that because a man lias a lot of hair he must be an unimpeacable pillar of propriety, tic may be merely a musician.