Word: nipponize
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Serious Offense. Eventually, the prosecutors hope to link these payments to government-influenced decisions to buy Lockheed planes. One case involves a 1972 decision by All Nippon Airways to buy Lockheed passenger jets, despite having taken a prior option to purchase McDonnell-Douglas aircraft. In a second case, the Japanese reversed plans to build their own antisubmarine patrol planes, and instead decided to study the Lockheed P-3C Orion. If the cash pocketed by Tanaka can be tied to these decisions, Tanaka will almost surely be charged with bribery, a serious offense opening him to a maximum prison sentence...
...that their principal art was being looted from them, and they were right. Hundreds of ancient swords, including 42 documented National Treasures made between the 12th and 15th centuries, vanished as souvenirs and have never reappeared. The Americans thought they were guarding against insurgency, and they were wrong. The Nippon-tō-"art swords"-were ritual and aesthetic objects, the core symbols of Shintoism, and would not have been used in combat...
Taxing Subtleties. The art of making steel reached its peak in Japan before the 16th century. Our present technology can dump men on the moon, but it cannot match the crystalline structure, hardness, flexibility and exquisite surface pattern of these ancient blades made in charcoal forges. Compared to Nippon-tō, the swords of Europe are kitchen cutlery...
...this reason, connoisseurs of Nippon-tō are apt to regard the military uses of their swords as a distraction, even as an embarrassment. The annals of samurai conduct are filled with prodigies of sword wielding: as recently as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, for instance, a Japanese officer charged a Russian machine gun, so the story goes, and cut clean through its barrel and water jacket with one swipe of his tachi. But the art swords in this show were not meant for such ends. Their unblemished state testifies that they can rarely, if ever, have seen battle...
...Japan totaled $12.6 million. Some $7 million went to Yoshio Kodama, a founder and onetime major bankroller of the party; the payments coincided with unexpected purchases in 1960 of Lockheed F-104 Starfighters by the Japanese government and the ordering in 1972 of six Lockheed TriStar jetliners by All Nippon Airways. The Japanese Diet will hold hearings on the affair this week; opposition politicians are demanding that Kakuei Tanaka, who was Prime Minister at the time of the TriStar buy, be called for questioning...