Word: kawasaki
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...Honshu's black mountain ridges. By day, the world's largest metropolis (pop. 11.4 million) is a hazy brown and gray sprawl. Prosperity has only worsened Tokyo's housing shortage, its snarled traffic, and the soot that boils in across the brown Sumida River from the blast furnaces of Kawasaki, which has 3,000 industrial plants and a population of 940,000. Two-thirds of Tokyo is still without sewers; residents are served by "honeybucket" men, trucks and a "night-soil fleet" of disposal ships, some as big as 1,000 tons, that make daily dumping trips offshore...
Many Japanese have an almost masochistic talent for selfcriticism. In Japan Unmasked, former Japanese Diplomat Ichiro Kawasaki ascribes the arrogance of the Japanese to what he calls their preoccupation with social rank. Writes Kawasaki, who was sacked from the diplomatic corps last year because his book created such an uproar: "The Japanese harbor an inferiority complex toward Europeans and Americans, while they tend to treat Asians with a superiority complex. This is why the average Japanese, while feeling at home in the company of Asiatics, often betrays arrogance and disdain...
...been the Japanese ambassador to Iran, Poland and now Argentina, and he had served the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo for 37 impeccable years, but last week 59-year-old Ichiro Kawasaki found himself sacked for that most undiplomatic sin of all-speaking out. Was he guilty of gossiping about the Shah, uncovering the truth behind Polish jokes, or detailing the gaucheness of the gauchos? Not a bit of it. All Kawasaki did was to write a book, Japan Unmasked, about his fellow Japanese...
After Foreign Minister Kiichi Aichi scanned the book, he erupted. Among other things, Kawasaki had quoted a remark generally attributed to General Charles de Gaulle: just before a formal chat in 1964 with the late Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, he confided that "today I am going to have a little talk with a transistor-radio salesman." Even more annoying to Aichi was Kawasaki's charge that in Japan "there is clearly an absence of leadership at the top, no realization of what is best in the national interest, a shortage of moral courage and discipline." Political parties got short...
...Kawasaki write the book? "It is an attempt," he told Japanese correspondents, "at helping to enhance understanding about Japanese among foreigners." Kawasaki's sort of understanding, however, was not considered desirable by the Tokyo government. Last week Kawasaki was on his way home to begin his retirement somewhat earlier than usual. Would he live in Tokyo? Probably not, since he also observed in his book that "it is one of the ugliest and most disorderly capitals of the world...