Word: nase
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life is grim on Amami Oshima, an island in the typhoon-swept East China Sea, 200 miles southwest of Japan. The islanders are beset by leprosy, poverty, poisonous snakes, and fire. Again and again, storm-spread fires have all but wiped out the wooden shanties of Nase, the island's largest town (pop. 43,000). This month such a fire razed one of Nase's poorest sections-and blazed up into an ideological battle between a Communist and a Christian...
Father Lukaszweski, 35, shimpu-san (priest) of a flock of 3,000, went to Nase in 1952 straight from four years of working among the poor in Bridgeport. When he arrived, he spoke no Japanese; today he sometimes has to search for the right word in English. He and two other Franciscan priests (both American) and two lay brothers tour the island by jeep-and when the jeeps break down, on foot. "We count distances not in miles but in mountains climbed," says Father Jerome...