A Japanese miscellany - University of Oregon

210 Japanese Miscellany
country or race. Being the natural utterance of
mother-love, the lullaby may be said to express
the most ancient form of tender experience ; and
in almost every time and place the essential char-
acter of this variety of folk-song has been little
affected by social changes of any sort. Whether
narrative or jingle, sense or nonsense, the verses
usually contain some reference to those familiar
things in which the child-mind discovers cause
for wonder : horses or cows, trees or flowers, the
moon and the stars, birds or butterflies, sights of
the street or garden. Often the lullaby repre-
sents the reiteration of one term of caress, alter-
nated with promises of reward for docility, and
hints of danger as a result of fretfulness. The
promises commonly refer to food or toys; and
the threatened penalties are not to be inflicted by
the mother, but by some bogey or goblin having
power to punish naughty children. To such
general rules the Japanese lullabies do not offer
any remarkable exceptions; but they abound in
queer fancies, and have a distinctly Oriental
quality.
Perhaps the European reader will be startled by
the apparition of the syllables nenne and nenneho