Word: japanized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...party theorist. About one new idea from the busy brain of Nikita Khrushchev Chou was significantly silent. In tossing out ideas for all kinds of Soviet-style disarmament plans, Khrushchev proposed an atom-free neutral zone in the Pacific, vaguely defined but seeming to include Red China, Japan, and the U.S. testing areas in the Marshalls. One obvious interpretation: Khrushchev too is not anxious to have his big and impetuous Chinese brothers admitted to the world's nuclear club...
This publishing success would not impress the Japanese. Each month 680 poetry magazines with a combined circulation of 240,000 are printed in Japan. Toyo Keizai, a sort of Japanese Wall Street Journal, runs a haiku assortment every week. Hototogisu (Cuckoo), a haiku magazine founded in 1897, claims a substantial though private monthly circulation of 20,000. Japan's 500,000 practicing poets can win prize money from most of the metropolitan newspapers and from the Emperor himself. They write in all the classic forms, but the simple 17-syllable haiku, usually arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern...
Above all, Henderson's patient translations (one took him 25 years) capture, unimpaired, the evanescent haiku spirit, which has enchanted Japan for untold centuries...
...Japan's suicide rate has always been notoriously high (24.2 per 100,000 a year, v. 10.2 in the U.S., by latest figures), but last week a leading Tokyo psychiatrist drew attention to a still more chilling statistic: in the 15-to-24 age group, suicide is the leading cause of death. The rate for these teen-agers and young adults, said Dr. Tsunehisa Takeyama, is 54.8 per 100,000. Accidents are the next commonest cause of death, with a rate of 42.8, and tuberculosis third, at 21.3. No less than 34% of all Japan...
Plumbing the Japanese mentality for the causes of young people's death wishes, Psychiatrist Takeyama argues: the Confucian precept of unquestioning obedience to elders and superiors was deliberately perverted by the Tokugawa Shogunate (which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868) to maintain a rigid caste system. Obedience is still drummed into modern Japanese youth. But, says Dr. Takeyama: "While it remains a basic influence in their unconscious makeup, it conflicts sharply with their conscious striving to behave in accordance with modern Western ways...