Word: japanned
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Ferment. Japan last week scarcely looked like the proper setting for such portentous words. The cherry blossoms were advancing northward through the islands. The first white buds had appeared at Kagoshima, Japan's southernmost and warmest port. Slowly they had taken all of Kyushu Island and, crossing the narrow straits, had established a beachhead on the rocky coast of Honshu. The blossoms last week sprouted near the Kure dockyards and on a thousand drowsy islands dotting the Inland...
...even in this scene, the country was in ferment. The "bloodless revolution" was in full swing. Just two years ago, the Diet passed Japan's new constitution. MacArthur himself had written the first draft in his clear, old-fashioned hand. It reduced the Emperor from godhead to symbol, abolished the feudal aristocracy, gave the Diet genuine power to make laws, guaranteed popular liberties, decreed sex equality, renounced the nation's right to make war, even for self-defense. It contained such alien concepts as "public servants" (ancient custom made bureaucrats responsible only to the Throne) and "pursuit...
...will be before belief in true democracy can scale down the price of black-market soap. Said a greying Osaka politician: "We can explain the theory of democracy and even make laws about it. But to feel it, that is the big jump. Let's face it-Japan is being baptized at a very...
Exit, a God. A sociologist who has spent a lifetime studying the conservative folk of Japan's fishing villages said last week: "Everywhere I go the conflict is the same. It is the young against the old. The old instinctively want to preserve past ways, but they are losing. Now, in the village assemblies the youngsters speak out against their fathers-often violently. The old, rigid family structure is cracking. Where the young will go, what faith they will finally adopt, I don't know...
Everywhere in Japan, the people are suspended between the old, which is no longer considered right, and the new, which they do not yet understand. One day last week, Emperor Hirohito celebrated his 48th birthday. Between morning and nightfall, nearly 400,000 Japanese filed into the palace gardens to pay their respects to the Mikado. Since the Emperor has formally ceased to be a god and has begun to move freely about his realm, he has become even more popular with his people than in the old days. His subjects seem to prefer his humanity to his divinity; at baseball...