Rittoru Dahring

While pious Japanese celebrated the rites of spring by making the traditional round of Buddhist temples and the tombs of their ancestors, thousands of Japanese "lowteen" girls in braids, pony tails, hula shirts, black slacks and white sweaters celebrated in their own way: jamming Tokyo's Kyoritsu Theater to swoon and scream at the pelvic pulsations of guitar-twanging "rockabilly" idols. Said a dazed stagehand last week, trying to describe the massed sound of their screams: "Like an auto suddenly braked at 100 m.p.h."

When a singer really sends them, Japanese lowteens (13-to 16-year-olds) hurl colored paper streamers onstage, and many of them practice at home to improve their marksmanship. Those who cannot afford streamers have taken to looting department-store powder rooms of rolls of toilet paper on which they scribble lipsticked love messages, such as daite ageru wayo (I shall hold you), before sending the tissue arching over the footlights. The top rockabilly stars--Masaaki Hirao, 20; Keijiro Yamashita, 19; Micky Curtis, 18, the son of an English father and an English-Japanese mother--wear flame-red shirts, rose-pink coats, lobster-colored tight pants, blue or white suede shoes. They have learned their art from listening to U.S. records of Elvis Presley, though sometimes the lyrics suffer a transoceanic mutilation, as in Rub Me Tender and Rittoru Dahring (Little Darling). Hi rao is solemnly described by one of his fans as "Japan's Elvis Presley but more acceptable to us because his gestures are not so obscene." Hirao's father, who manufactures teen-age cosmetics, prints his son's autograph on every box, and says: "I can't understand his music, but he and I can do business."

Japanese rockabilly began in Tokyo tearooms where, for 25-c-, a patron can have a cup of coffee and several hours of canned or live music. When it moved to the theaters. 50,000 caterwauling girls piled into the Nichigeki in seven days carrying box lunches of rice and seaweed. The Koma Theater drew bigger crowds with rockabilly than with the New York City Ballet. Four hours before the doors opened at the Kyoritsu teen-agers had formed in a queue three blocks long.

Older critics reacted predictably, crying out against "lacquered monkeys" and their "apelike mumblings," and a right-wing youth leader stormed: "This proves the Japanese should not have freedom!" But the little girls seemed not to hear, and the ,, cascades of streamers and toilet paper did not stop. Brooded Sociologist Hideo Shi-busawa: "Rockabilly is more like a pathetic distortion of religion than an outlet for sex. Rockabilly singers are the preachers of a strange new faith; the lowteens are the faith's blind worshipers."

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