Word: hokkaido
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Minoru and her husband, a onetime airplane mechanic, had been faced with a choice at war's end: to return to the hopelessness of the burned-out ruins of Tokyo or to start a new life as pioneers on the far northern island of Hokkaido. Government posters showed Hokkaido's inviting green landscapes, its fat dairy herds, its red brick silos and its snug, warm farmhouses. Along with some 190,000 other Japanese families, the Gotos seized the opportunity...
Unlike the Posters. Life in Hokkaido, the northernmost and second largest island in the Japanese chain, turned out not to be like the posters. In winter the farms of the homesteaders lay under snow that heaped in drifts up to 6 ft. high. In summer the island's rocky, clay-filled soil was stubbornly unproductive. Hokkaido crop yields were only half of those harvested elsewhere in the nation...
This fall Hokkaido's farmers suffered their worst crop failure in 42 years. Hokkaido's fishermen were doing just as badly: harried by Russian gunboats from the Kurile and Sakhalin islands, they were desperately forced to overfish their own meager waters...
...Cadillac-plated prosperity in Tokyo, only the efforts of a group of charities ranging from the United Nations International Children's Fund and Catholic and Protestant groups to Japan's own Association of Pinball Machine Manufacturers have been able to stave off actual starvation in Hokkaido. Even though the U.S. Air Force last week flew in three planeloads of food. Hokkaido's farmers face both hunger and bankruptcy. "We've sold even the gold from our teeth," one farmer told TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast. "The only thing we've left to sell is our daughter...
...Palace, he might hear something to his advantage about the island territories. Hatoyama, who needs such a political victory to keep his Liberal-Democratic government from falling apart, had hopes that the Russians might yield, not Sakhalin or all the Kuril Islands, but at least Habomai and Shikotan off Hokkaido, which Russia last year promised to return...