Word: amami
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life is grim on Amami Oshima, an island in the typhoon-swept East China Sea, 200 miles southwest of Japan. The islanders are beset by leprosy, poverty, poisonous snakes, and fire. Again and again, storm-spread fires have all but wiped out the wooden shanties of Nase, the island's largest town (pop. 43,000). This month such a fire razed one of Nase's poorest sections-and blazed up into an ideological battle between a Communist and a Christian...
Most of the islanders are animists who people every rock and tree with good and evil spirits. The Franciscans' real enemy is harder to cope with than any swarm of spirits. It is called MamorKai ("Remember to Take Care of"), a front organization that provides the poor of Amami Oshima with cash handouts, food, free medical care and large doses of Communist indoctrination. Its boss: Comrade Nakamura, 48, who so far has run in six elections, lost four, is currently a member of the regional assembly. Communist Nakamura is careful not to attack the friars directly. "I respect Father...
Japan's Emperor Hirohito, a sometime poet (TIME, Jan. 14) and marine biologist, was hailed for a pioneer bit of research in his scientific pursuits. A clam shell sent to him last fall from the Amami-Orshima Islands (between Japan and Okinawa) was painstakingly identified by the Emperor as none other than a Benishibori-Minomushi bivalve. Significance: never before, claimed the Imperial Palace, had this clam been found so far north. Japan's news agency gave an unrestrained banzai: "Through his personal keen interest in marine biology, His Majesty turned up a new discovery on the living habits...
...exception to the U.S. rule: the U.S. will return to Japan the Amami Oshima group of the Ryukyus, five main islands with a population of 200,000, and the first bit of war-lost territory that Japan has regained...
...defense. But he also made a striking political concession to Japan, at a time when this sensitive country, whose big industry holds Asia's balance of power, is worried about its economic future and is being sedulously wooed by Russia and Communist China. The return of the Amami Oshima archipelago to Japanese rule, after eight years of U.S. occupation, removes a major source of Japanese irritation with the U.S., and puts some uncomfortable pressure on the Russians to do likewise with the extensive Japanese real estate (e.g., the Kuril Islands) they hold in the north...