Word: hokkaido
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eager for new spending appropriations, officials of Japan's self-defense forces stressed the potential "Soviet threat" to Japan's main northern island of Hokkaido. But Premier Masayoshi Ohira, who was busy with the final stage of Japan's election campaign, tried to play down the controversy. Among other things, he feared that a strident debate over the islands would further poison Soviet-Japanese relations, already damaged by Tokyo's friendship treaty with China last year. Accordingly, his Foreign Minister, Sunao Sonoda, dovishly cautioned against "overreaction," sounding very much like U.S. officials on the Cuban issue...
...fresh season of volcanic activity has begun. On Japan's northern island of Hokkaido last week, thousands of acres around Mount Usu lay under a cover of gray ash, and Usu continued to steam and rumble ominously. Italy's Mount Etna has erupted for the third time in a month, sending a stream of lava three kilometers (two miles) down the mountainside and shooting a pillar of flame and smoke 450 meters (1,500 ft.) into the air. Both provided evidence that, regardless of progress in other areas, man is still powerless to control the fires beneath...
Mount Usu had last erupted in 1945. Since then, magma, or semimolten rock from the mantle surrounding the earth's core, had been slowly and quietly rising through cracks under the peak of the mountain, building up tremendous pressures and triggering repeated earth tremors that rocked Hokkaido. Finally, on Aug. 7, the 725-meter (2,400-ft.) Usu awakened with a roar like that of a bomb. A huge black cloud soared to a height of 12,000 meters (39,000 ft.). A dense shower of gray ash and chunks of porous, rock-like pumice poured...
...unperturbed, the Japanese prepared last week to return the Foxbat to the Russians. The angry Soviets will send a freighter to take delivery of their aircraft at the port of Hitachi. The Japanese coolly demanded that the Russians compensate them for facilities damaged when Belenko overran the runway on Hokkaido and for the expense of dismantling, crating and transporting the plane from Hyakuri airbase, 90 miles north of Tokyo, to Hitachi...
...lines, only the bullet trains and two of Tokyo's urban services turn profits. The rest lose money at a rate that makes the old Penn Central's losses trivial by comparison. One example: the Biko line, which serves a sparsely populated area on the island of Hokkaido, has outlays of $11 for every 34? it earns. In the past twelve years, the Japanese National Railway has piled up a staggering debt of $34 billion; at present it is losing money at the rate of $8.6 million...