With its many onomatopoeic words, the Japanese language booms and trills, echoing with musical lingo. Usually written in katakana, these words imitating sound or motion inundate normal Japanese speech, from the zaza of a summer rainstorm to the shin of embarrassed silence.
Warabe Uta or traditional Japanese nursery rhymes, often use these sound-words. Japan thus boasts a rich collection of endearing children's songs, easy to remember with their appealing rhythms: the korokoro of an acorn as it rolls or the zunzun of snow piling up.
A new bilingual collection from Tuttle, "Japanese Nursery Rhymes: Carp Streamers, Falling Rain and other Traditional Favorites," delights with sound and color as a picture book, a Japanese language primer and a sing-a-long.