Word: osaka
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, TIME Correspondent Frank Gibney visited two Japanese cities-Osaka and Nagoya. His report...
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a tough, imperialistic warrior shogun, was the first Japanese to dream of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As an anchor for his international conquests, Hideyoshi chose Osaka, built a castle there in the latter part of the 16th Century. Hideyoshi and Osaka got along fine, and ever since then Osaka's merchants have done their best to keep alive his spirit. They gambled when the gambling was good, hedged only when they had to. They became and remain to this day the financial lords of Japan...
...quarter of a century later, Hideyoshi's successor as shogun, arch-isolationist Tokugawa Ieyasu, built a stronghold at Nagoya, 100 miles northeast of Osaka, Ieyasu wanted neither conquest nor foreign trade; he clamped the lid on Japan, and his family kept it there for 300 years. Like Osaka, Nagoya grew up in the image of its maker. Nagoyans put classical poems, flower arrangements and the complex subtleties of the Japanese tea ceremony ahead of commerce and industry; they dislike to hustle; there is still a feeling that trade is somewhat vulgar...
...difference between Osaka and Nagoya goes straight to the heart of the Japanese character. The Japanese are a people with a split personality, and Osaka and Nagoya are extreme examples of their duality. The Japan of Osaka is progressive, militant, competent, rude. The Japan of Nagoya is hidebound, passive, polite and wary of outside influences...
...fishmonger, Hattori grew up in brawling Osaka, the New Orleans of jazzu. At 16, he landed with a boy's band employed by a rich eel merchant to drum up business. By 1925, Hattori was so expert on flute and oboe that the Osaka Symphony Orchestra hired him. But jazz looked more profitable, and Hattori quit the symphony to organize the most famous of early Jap jazzbands, "Hattori and His Manila Red-Hot Stompers...