Japanese Earthquake

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 73, 15 January 1947, Page 2

Japanese Earthquake

To see Kochi and Gomen, in southernmost Shikoku, is to realise to the full the terror and devastation caused by the earthquake on January 2, reports the Official News Service. Nearly one-third of Gomen is still under water and 40,000 people are homeless in the bitter cold. No one yet knows how many were trapped in the shattered and flooded buildings. For more than a mile between Kochi and Gomen the main shopping centre is submerged and lined with wrecked house's. Rafts and boats are floating about what was an electric tram route. Wrecked buildings, broken cables and telegraph poles tilted at crazy angles give the district a fantastic apearance. In places even the roads have buckled into high billows of earth. A three-storeyed reinforced concrete building in Gomen split open and collapsed into a great pile of rubble. Scenes along the flooded streets are heartrending. Hundreds, of people are still living in the upper storeys of their tottering homes, waiting vainly for the flood to subside. They have nowhere else to go. Scholarship in Conducting Following the scholarship at the Julliard School of Music (New York) given Richard (“Junior”) Farrell, formerly of Wellington, chiefly on the recommendation of his friend, William Kappell, the brilliant American pianist, Farrell, who is still studying under Madame Samaroff in New York, has now been awarded a conducting scholarship, a rare prize in the world of music. It was made on the recommendation of Aaron Copland, perhaps America’s foremost composer of modern music of the day, whose works have been played by Farrell with some distinction in New York city. The scholarship embraces a term of tuition in conducting under the renowned Russian conductor, Serge Koussevitisky.