Word: osaka
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...Cafe Osaka, unemployment is made to seem almost agreeable. The experimental job-placement office, partially owned and operated by the Osaka city government, is staffed by women in brightly colored uniforms who greet their downcast clients with a bracing, robotically cheerful "Konnichiwa!" Job seekers, most of them dressed in dark blue "recruit suits," help themselves to free coffee, juice or oolong tea while perusing binders of employment listings and speaking to job counselors or company recruiters. The song Don't Worry, Be Happy endlessly loops over the sound system...
...Opportunities in Japan's second largest metropolis are scarce; Osaka prefecture's unemployment rate of 6.4% was the third highest in the nation last year. Even if he could find work, Ijiri says he feels unprepared to join the winner-takes-all rat race of postindustrial Japan. He longs for his father's era, the heyday of Japan Inc., when young adults were whisked directly from college into a womblike corporate career, where they would be sheltered by a paternalistic business culture for life. "People like me who aren't particularly talented at anything are happier with the old system...
...part of the history of JA8119 (the plane's serial number) particularly attracted the probers' attention. On June 2, 1978, the aircraft approached a landing at Osaka with its nose too high. The tail and the rear part of the fuselage slammed into the tarmac at 320 m.p.h.; the impact ripped aluminum skin panels from the belly of the plane. JA8119 was grounded for a month while Boeing engineers supervised repairs that included replacement of the lower part of the rear fuselage...
...British aviation expert remained suspicious of the botched Osaka landing as a possible cause of Flight 123's crash. William Tench, recently retired chief inspector of accidents at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, said he knew of cases in which it took three years before a crack became visible after an aircraft was heavily jolted. Japan's Ministry of Transport promptly ordered that the tail areas of all 747s registered in that country be re-examined, with special attention to the link holding the fin to the fuselage...
Working in the wee hours, small bands of radical activists and students had used wire snippers to sever coaxial and optical cables for signal, communication and computer systems at 24 locations in Tokyo, Osaka and five other cities. Using canisters of kerosene attached to crude timing devices, they also blew up or burned down cable connections. Thus, when railway officials tried to start the first trains of the day at 5 a.m., they found to their horror that neither signal lights nor rail switches were operating on 22 commuter lines. As a result, the system in Tokyo and Osaka remained...