Word: japanned
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Safer Way. The little man was the measure of America's task. The little man -and millions like him-wanted to know what he might bow to now. Emperor MacArthur? The American flag? If democracy was the faith of the men who had beaten Japan, it was probably a good thing; he would make obeisance...
...argued that in prewar Japan democratic forms were merely superimposed on ancient, rigid social patterns. In Japan today the U.S. is breaking up those social patterns. It is deliberately fostering a social revolution far bolder than anything colonial powers of the past have attempted in Asia. This revolution might lead to real democracy; it might also backfire as badly as Japan's earlier and shallower experiment with Western progress. Americans and Japanese are groping down a dim and dangerous road. But there is no safer...
...Strange Hills. For the time being, Japan's plain people were still not mainly concerned with the road to democracy; they worried-like people in the best regulated societies-about the road that would lead them to the 'biggest bowl of rice. In a Tokyo saloon last week Mikizo Kawahara, an unemployed counterman, said: "It's useless to talk to me about democracy and new ideals-get me a job first!" A bearded grocer near by put down his cup of watered sake and nodded: "Life here," he said, "is like trying to do business...
...Japan is desperately poor. Miles of gaping ruins still deface the land, though in the big cities jerry-built warrens of small houses and shops hide some of the scars of bomb destruction. The crowds that haggle over prices in Tokyo's Shimbashi market are only slightly better dressed than they were four years ago. High priced Tokyo shops sell "fancy silk ties, brocade purses and delicate chinaware, but few can afford them. The Ginza's humbler stalls have stacks of hardware and kitchen utensils, but still at soaring black-market prices. Chubby new autos (toyoda toyopetto...
...newly rich black-marketeers fling lavish parties in speakeasy restaurants for their geisha girls. Pomaded dandies and taxi-dancers foxtrot in crowded dance-halls to the melancholy strains of ikoku no oka, "the hills of a strange land"-a hit-parade lament about Japan's 400,000 strong P.W.s still held in Soviet Siberia...