Word: ginza
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...carefree days when tourism earned them more money from overseas than even the silk textile business, the Japanese had looked forward eagerly to the well-advertised arrival of the Caronia, for its staterooms were filled with the most expensive collection of dollar-heavy souvenir hunters ever to hit the Ginza. In accommodations that cost from $2,750 (for a B-deck cabin with two bunks) to $29,000 (for a main deck suite), they had come from the U.S. (500 of them in all) to see the Pacific in style over a leisurely 99 days, picking up memories and mementos...
...Japanese have the highest living standard in Asia; last week Tokyo's Ginza glittered with Christmas displays and selling was brisk. Japan is an expense account state: there is a new rich class, with fishtail Cadillacs and matched sets of Spaulding golf clubs. But the average industrial wages are low in Japan ($42 a month), and workers have almost no savings at all. The Korean war boom is spent, though prices are up 59% since 1950. For many urban families, the next paycheck is the only shield against disaster...
Humanitarian is not the word that leaps to mind at the sight of slick, pomaded Ujitoshi Konomi. One of the sharpest characters in Tokyo's gaudy Ginza district, Konomi has been in his time a gangster and political terrorist in Shanghai, a smuggler, black-marketeer and saloonkeeper in Japan. Konomi is also a man with important political connections. To forestall trouble, he is constantly accompanied by a bodyguard, a onetime lieutenant colonel in the Imperial Army. Still and all, it was as a humanitarian that Konomi filed a request with the Welfare Ministry back in 1949 to build...
...open cars the ballplayers rode up Tokyo's Broadway, the Ginza. But after the motorcade, lit by magnesium flares, nudged its way through four blocks of jammed, yelling fans, who ignored restraining cops and pressed right up to the cars, Manager Frank ("Lefty") O'Doul asked the parade to be canceled: "I'd hate to see people hurt in this thing." Hanging out of windows, peering from rooftops, clinging precariously from lampposts, surging in the streets were 400,000 Japanese, almost twice as many as saw Douglas MacArthur off in April...
From Osaka and Kobe to Tokyo, up & down the Ginza (Tokyo's Broadway) and through the Shinjuku (Tokyo's Montmartre), half-educated trumpets got in their licks, and demi-lingual cries, Tokyo boogie-woogie, rhythm uki-uki, Kokoro zuki-zuki, waku-waku, jarred the night. Pickup bands were a yen a dozen, and most Japanese seemed to have the yen. They liked it blue, hot, and syrup-sweet, and called it all jazzu...