Untamed!

Japan, which leads all Asian nations in imitating the West, has lately acquired both a lost generation and a flaming youth. Currently, the symbol of both is a girl with waist-length black hair, cat's eyes and a fox smile who could be seen last week on the stage of Osaka's Kitano Theater. As she closed her eyes, and with hips swaying began to sing (in alternating English and Japanese verses) an excruciatingly off-key version of Banana Boat Song, her quivering fans rose from their seats and screamed with delight. At 18 Michiko Hamamura is touted, more or less correctly, as "the hottest property in Japanese show business."

"She sings," an unkind critic has said of Michiko, "but not well. Her fans are there to look, not listen." Michiko's looks have sold 100,000 copies of her first Victor recording (Banana Boat Song, Venezuela) in a single month, and have touched off a deluge of fan letters, mostly from teenagers. Like France's Juliette Greco--whom she strikingly resembles--she has become the darling of the intelligentsia, who have celebrated her in ponderous prose. Says one literary critic: "Her primitive songs match men's desire to escape the confused mechanism of today's living." Says another: "She is like a woman who rebels against society and fulfills her human desires."

Michiko shot to her present eminence by a maneuver familiar to Hollywood: posing in the seminude. The daughter of an Osaka metal-shop owner, she arrived in Tokyo when she was 15 seeking a singing career, but was bluntly told by the first recording company she went to that she could not sing. Nevertheless, she got singing engagements in U.S. Army camps, picked up a smattering of English, and went on the nightclub circuit. There Photographer Tateyuki Nakamura spotted her, persuaded her to pose in black silk stockings and little else. The photograph, when it appeared in a magazine, was enough to start the Michiko boom.

Michiko, who now lives with her mother and brother in a two-room Tokyo apartment, takes a slightly jaundiced view of her sudden success: "I don't know what's different or good about me." Nevertheless, she has more offers for theater dates than she can handle, has just been signed for a movie. "She has a sort of refined wildness," says one producer. For all her highly publicized sex appeal ("Sensational! Untamed!"), Michiko has more female fans than male, chiefly because Japanese men prefer their women more submissive, get nervous at the thought of untamed flaming youth. "What she will do or say next," said one apprehensive Japanese admirer, "only God knows."

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