Word: nagoya
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Anybody with a bank account and sailing experience can sail the Pacific next summer according to Brice Sumner '53, who plans to pilot a 35-foot sailboat from Nagoya, Japan, to San Francisco...
Long-faced, buck-toothed Kameo Sadaki, caretaker of the ruined debris of the Aichi torpedo plant, shook his head, said with Nagoya's curious local pride: "We had almost 25,000 workers here. In five minutes, nothing was left. No factory in Japan was so beautifully bombed." The Aichi plant, which was 95% destroyed, is being sold for scrap metal to anyone that will carry it away. Youngish Toshio Takahashi, the plant manager, says softly: "It still seems like a dream to see all this. I suppose we should tear it down quickly, but that would cost too much...
Osaka, which is Japan's No. 1 commercial city, grew naturally with the progressive expansionism of her hustling merchants. Nagoya, industrially the child of the Greater East Asia War, grew artificially, by military fiat. Fifty-five-year-old Junji Hattori, manager of a Mitsubishi plant in Nagoya, put it this way: "When the military sticks its nose into civilian affairs, it makes horrible mistakes. Look at us now-no money, no initiative, no incentive. I'm afraid Nagoya's flower has bloomed and withered. Whether new buds will appear, only time will tell...
...even though Nagoya's sleepy isolation and commercial torpor are worlds away from the energetic, expansionist drive of Osaka, the problems that the two cities have to face are largely the same. Japan must live on its exports. To export profitably, it must change its trade patterns, send heavy machinery where it once sent textiles, step up its export of bicycles, eventually export airplanes. Japanese managers and engineers must pull up their socks and streamline their subsidy-softened industries...
...Japanese who must put forth this supreme effort, however, have first to conquer their national schizophrenia, to achieve a union between the descendants of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu. Osaka and Nagoya must somehow be put together if Japan is to survive...