Word: osaka
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...geisha houses that cater to the expense-account set. On Tokyo's Ginza alone, well-oiled businessmen drop some $500 million yearly at more than 1,000 bars and restaurants. Prices effectively screen out patrons who have only their own money to spend: dinner for two at Osaka's Yamato-ya restaurant costs about $230, while four Scotch-and-waters at a select Tokyo bar can run to $120, including a tray of hors d'oeuvres and fruit juice for hostesses that the bar employs to keep conversation going. At Osaka's Club Azami, a patron...
...afternoon last December, three men armed with steel bars burst into the Osaka city room of the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers. "Howling like mad dogs," as one eyewitness recalled later, the thugs knocked over desks, broke windows and beat up several reporters. By the time police arrived, the city room was a shambles, and eleven editorial staffers lay injured. Next day, Yomiuri reported that the daylight raid on its offices had been staged by organized gangsters in retaliation against the newspaper's describing them in a story as "a pack of bandits." The thugs...
...lower than other Japanese.* About 7% of buraku families are on relief, more than twice the national average, and juvenile delinquency is 3/2 times higher among them than among other Japanese youths. According to Sueo Murakoshi, an outcast who surmounted the system to become a professor of sociology at Osaka City University and secretary-general of the Buraku Problem Research Institute: "Some high school classes attended by buraku boys have turned into blackboard jungles." On the island of Shikoku, angry outcasts have beaten up their teachers and broken 2,000 school windowpanes in a single year...
...Gogh-went out the back door to a dealer for a rumored total of $1.5 million. He might have tried Japan first. Last week Tokyo Art Dealer Tokushichi Hasegawa took delivery of the Rousseau, which he had bought from Marlborough Fine Art in London and resold to an Osaka businessman (anonymous, for "tax reasons") for $2,000,000. Said Hasegawa who, at 33, is vice president of Nichido Gallery, Japan's largest art shop: "I only felt sorry that I couldn't pick up the Van Gogh as well...
Many Japanese corporations consider it a necessary status symbol to hang a Matisse or a Renoir in their VIP reception rooms. Japan's newly rich are also well aware that such art is now a good investment. One Osaka real estate baron recently won fame in the trade by phoning an art dealer these directions: "Get me 100 million yen [$330,000] worth of art-get me whatever you think would prove moneymaking." Japanese art buyers are operating like Sony executives all over Europe and the U.S. "No hammers go down nowadays either at Christie's or Sotheby...