Word: niigata
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nonetheless the scandal is taking its toll. Last week an L.D.P. candidate lost badly (51% to 44%) to a Japan Socialist Party member in a by-election in Niigata prefecture, usually considered solidly L.D.P. The ruling party was quick to blame the three woes for its defeat. Niigata is the heart of rice- growing country, and the main farming cooperatives declined to endorse the L.D.P., citing the agriculture protection issue...
Ironically, one of the big winners was Tanaka, 65, leader of the largest faction within the L.D.P., whose bribery conviction last October had forced Nakasone to call the election. Despite the guilty verdict and opposition charges of "money politics," Tanaka's constituents in the northwestern prefecture of Niigata re-elected him with 221,000 votes, his most resounding victory since he first won the seat 36 years...
Tadashi and I had left the bullet train, on which we got to know each other, at Niigata and had taken a limited southwest down along the blue Sea of Japan. At the coastal city of Itoigawa we caught a primitive local that followed the Fossa Magna, that grand cleft dividing interior Japan, up into the Hida range. The train chugged upcountry, passing through hot-spring villages where station names were no longer in Roman letters, passing the jade mines at Kotaki. The railroad paralleled the Himekawa, a river that seemed to flow granite, so stony and gray...
...most elated observer was undoubtedly Araki, who regularly scans the skies over his village in Niigata prefecture. "I've discovered a wonderful star," said the young bachelor. "Now I've got to discover a wonderful wife." Perhaps the comet was a propitious sign...