Word: kumamoto
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...consists of a small hatch facing the outside of the building where desperate parents could safely and discreetly leave unwanted infants. But nobody was expecting to see a three-year-old deposited in the hatch. The toddler reportedly told doctors at the hospital in the southern Japanese city of Kumamoto that "I came with Daddy," and knew his own name, which enabled authorities to identify the father...
...projects, Japan has earned its reputation as the Construction State. Need an example? With 113 major rivers, the country has no fewer than 2,734 dams. That's why last week's surprise announcement of the first-ever dismantling of a Japanese dam is being hailed as a watershed. Kumamoto prefecture governor Yoshiko Shiotani declared that the Arase dam, which spans the Kumagawa River on Japan's southern island of Kyushu, would be torn down beginning in 2010. It's about time. Nearly 50 years old, the dam generates less than 1% of the region's electricity and would...
...born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955 on Kyushu, one of Japan's main islands, just south of Honshu. At birth he was sightless in one eye and purblind in the other, so his father, a craftsman who made tatamis (straw mats), sent him at age six to the city of Kumamoto, where he could attend a subsidized school for the blind. There a child with any sight at all had a great advantage. A former teacher said, "Being able to see even a little is prestigious because blind children want to go out and have coffee in a tearoom...
Following graduation, he set up shop as an acupuncturist-first in Kumamoto, then Tokyo and finally in a rented room in Funabashi. He married a college student, Tomoko Ishii, in 1978, then opened an apothecary specializing in traditional Chinese medicaments. A turning point in his life appears to have occurred in 1982, when he was arrested for selling fake cures. Authorities detained him for 20 days and fined him 200,000 yen--about $800 at that time. The business went bankrupt, and Asahara was reputedly shattered by the incident. Out of shame at what neighbors thought, for some time afterward...
...carrying a picture of an Indian saint, he went berserk and said I should not respect anyone but him." In this way, perhaps Asahara's early life was a foreshadowing of what would come later. "When I look at the way Aum operates," a onetime classmate in Kumamoto said, "I think Matsumoto is trying to create a closed society like the school for the blind he went to. He is trying to create a society separate from ordinary society in which he can become king of the castle...