Word: hokkaido
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Everywhere the old & the new, the right & the left seemed to be seeking the elusive dove in their own fashion. From far-off Hokkaido, lured by an enterprising Tokyo promoter, a tribe of Japan's aboriginal Ainus came to stage the first touring performance of their ancient bear festival...
...Tokyo audiences, the Ainus only pretended to kill the bear and drink his blood. They shared the bill with a bebop band and a nicely undressed chorus. "Tokyo," murmured one bush-bearded, 74-year-old aborigine eying the chorus, "is the best part of Japan; Hokkaido is too far out in the sticks...
Late in 1943, Masao Mimatsu, postmaster and amateur volcanologist of Sobetsu, a small town in southwestern Hokkaido, was working on routine papers. Once in a while he looked out the window at his pet volcano, intermittently active Mount Usu, two miles away. On Dec. 31 he heard a mighty rumbling and the ground began to tremble. Shouting "Ji-shin!" (earthquake), he rushed outdoors and looked again at Mount Usu. The tall black volcano showed no signs of life...
...immediate threat to U.S. security in the Pacific; Japan was the U.S.'s bastion and it was safe in MacArthur's hands. MacArthur himself now blasted this cozy concept. In the north, the Russians had always been in position to attack the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido from Vladivostok and their bases in the Kurils. The southward plunge of Chinese Reds now threatened to give Russia domination of the China coast down to Shanghai...
...newly won southern territory, MacArthur reasoned, the Reds would soon be able to establish bases from which an airborne conquest of thinly guarded Okinawa would be a cinch. The waters from Okinawa to Hokkaido could be patrolled by their 100 long-range submarines. In short, the fall of China, MacArthur observed, had made possible the military threat of a "double envelopment" of Japan. There was no evidence of an impending Soviet attack. If it came, it could only precipitate, or be part of, the world's worst war. But the business of a commander is not to guess whether...