Word: consulates
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...wheels of diplomacy are greased by many a lubricant: embassy parties, cocktails, rounds of golf. But when commercial treaty negotiations between Townsend Harris, the United States' first consul in Japan, and the Tokugawa shogunate bogged down in 1857, a rather more personal angle did the trick: a maid- servant named Okichi for the lonely American. Barbarian comforted, deal clinched...
...Gyokusenji, the Buddhist temple that in 1856 became the American consulate, is a good place to start a Shimoda excursion. Harris lived in the temple until 1857, and inside visitors will find drinking glasses, pipes and other belongings of the consul's, as well as somewhat ghastly life-size figurines of Harris and Okichi. There's also a passage from Harris's diary, engraved on a large outdoor marker, in which the New Yorker waxes severe: "At half past two p.m. of this day (Sept. 4, 1856) I hoist the first consular flag ever seen in this empire," he begins...
...Okichi's specter lurks throughout Shimoda, and you can sense her troubled soul best at Anchokuro, the restaurant she ran after Harris left for America, and at Hofukuji, where her bones lay in repose. The consul gone and reconciliation with her former lover Tsurumatsu failed, Okichi drowned herself like an Asian Ophelia in a river near Shimoda in 1892. "She persevered for Japan," said bus driver Kaoru Okabe. "But it must have been tough...
...Israelis, who have experienced other airport attacks, Hadayet's assault looked pretty plainly like an act of terrorism. "It was conducted in a way that reminds us of many previous attacks," says Yuval Rotem, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles. The FBI has been more cautious about categorizing the episode. Hadayet was not on any law-enforcement watch lists. At this early stage of the investigation, FBI officials speculate that he may have been depressed about personal problems. They want to know more about why police were once called to his apartment complex in Irvine, Calif., 44 miles south...
...earn about $5 per hour, although that's down from approximately $8 per hour a few months ago. "These are the people with the least amount of power and the lowest pay in society: maintaining their pay is the humane thing to do," says Maria Zeneida Angara-Collinson, Philippine Consul-General in Hong Kong. "If the government is looking at this as a way out of the economic slump, it's not going to make a dent...