Word: kano
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...smoke, and the ramshackle wooden shacks that the government hastily threw together afterward have been destroyed, at the rate of 30,000 a year, by fire and typhoon. To take care of the millions of homeless, the government picked a go-getting, 72-year-old banker named Hisaakira Kano, a former viscount. Kano's philosophy was simple but radical: "With too many people and too little land and with millions still needing homes, there is only one way to build in Japan today...
Houses with Shoes. In three years, Kano's Japan Housing Corp. has built in Tokyo alone "six new cities, each with 30,000 people." The "cities" are four-story apartment houses run either by the government corporation or by private companies that bought them for their employees. One building is filled with the families of 900 ragpickers who pay $1 a month in rent. In construction is a twelve-story building for the rich (monthly rent: up to $350), which will have a roof garden, Turkish baths, a nightclub, bowling alley and a parking lot for 250 automobiles...
...decorators are taking up Japanese-style sliding doors and silk screens, many Tokyo housewives now cook with gas, wash dishes in stainless steel sinks, and serve meals, not to a family sitting cross-legged on straw mats, but at Western tables. By 1993-"in time for my 107th birthday"-Kano hopes that Tokyo will be a city of skyscrapers, is even planning to build one 20 stories high...
...gadget-the simplest of them all in Western eyes-has already made its mark. "One of the first things I did, before we built a single apartment house," says Kano, "was to order thousands of Yale-type keys. The result has been staggering. Getting keys to their own front doors has done more to Westernize many Japanese than any other single factor." Kano's tenants agree. "Formerly," said one last week, "either my wife or myself or one of the children simply had to stay home when the rest were out: Japanese houses are quite open and there...
...streets. (Tokyo cops, splashing in hot pursuit, saved most of the carp as well as the Imperial swans.) On the "Japanese Riviera"-the mountainous Izu Peninsula southwest of Tokyo -two tiny coastal villages were washed out to sea and a dozen more engulfed by the swollen waters of the Kano River. Early this week, with the full extent of the damage still unknown, Japanese police estimated the nation's casualties at 337 dead, 984 missing...