Word: hokkaido
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...Korea, subsides in September. Peak numbers of cases go with hot, wet weather. In southern Japan, up to 95% of all tested subjects over 20 have antibodies which give them immunity: they have had an undetected, mild case, as so often happens with polio. But in cold, northern Hokkaido, fewer than 10% have antibodies. Where the people have antibodies, so have horses, cattle, goats, sheep and chickens. So Japanese farmers who have brought chickens into their homes (and Koreans who have asked the cattle in) during the epidemic season were working on the right clue, though they naively hoped that...
...tenderhearted Japanese public was properly indignant. Tokyo's Mainichi Shimbun last week carried a tearjerking headline: MAMMA AND BABY MARIMO FOUND. The pair had been abandoned in a milk bottle on a train from Hokkaido. The Japanese love marimos, as pets and as national treasures, and they hate anybody heartless enough to abuse them...
...marimo is a plant, a kind of alga (Aegagropila sauteri), found in three small patches of water in Lake Akan on the northern island of Hokkaido. Their name means "ball of fur," and fair-sized specimens look like green, fuzzy tennis balls. What makes them so dearly beloved is their quaint behavior...
...proclamation backfired. It advertised the marimos, and a second fad swept through Japan. Stealthy marimo-kapparai (marimo snatchers) haunted Lake Akan, diving into the water at night to kidnap the helpless creatures. Marimo smugglers brought them to Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, and Japanese tourists bought them furtively, paying up to $50. Biologists and nature lovers wrung their hands in anguish, but nothing effective was done. The little pets from Lake Akan were snatched almost to extinction...
Japan, too, he told some visiting Japanese Diet members, may have all their prisoners of war (Japanese estimate: 10,000; Russian: 1,047) in exchange for ending the state of war and establishing diplomatic relations. Also, he hinted, the Soviet Union might throw in two tiny islands north of Hokkaido that Russia has held since the end of World War II-but not the Kurils and southern Sakhalin, awarded to Stalin by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Yalta...