Word: oshima
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life is grim on Amami Oshima, an island in the typhoon-swept East China Sea, 200 miles southwest of Japan. The islanders are beset by leprosy, poverty, poisonous snakes, and fire. Again and again, storm-spread fires have all but wiped out the wooden shanties of Nase, the island's largest town (pop. 43,000). This month such a fire razed one of Nase's poorest sections-and blazed up into an ideological battle between a Communist and a Christian...
...islanders are animists who people every rock and tree with good and evil spirits. The Franciscans' real enemy is harder to cope with than any swarm of spirits. It is called MamorKai ("Remember to Take Care of"), a front organization that provides the poor of Amami Oshima with cash handouts, food, free medical care and large doses of Communist indoctrination. Its boss: Comrade Nakamura, 48, who so far has run in six elections, lost four, is currently a member of the regional assembly. Communist Nakamura is careful not to attack the friars directly. "I respect Father Jerome," he says...
...Oshima, outside Tokyo Bay, stands the active volcano Mihara. It bubbles with sulphurous vapor and at irregular intervals shoots out molten rock. Japan has many active volcanoes, but Mihara is specially famed because of the romantic lovers who frequently kill themselves by jumping down its throat. Before World War II, 80 to 90 did this each year, and the steamship company that serves Oshima got rich on tourists who flocked to the island, they said, to watch the volcano, but really to watch the suicides...
...exception to the U.S. rule: the U.S. will return to Japan the Amami Oshima group of the Ryukyus, five main islands with a population of 200,000, and the first bit of war-lost territory that Japan has regained...
...defense. But he also made a striking political concession to Japan, at a time when this sensitive country, whose big industry holds Asia's balance of power, is worried about its economic future and is being sedulously wooed by Russia and Communist China. The return of the Amami Oshima archipelago to Japanese rule, after eight years of U.S. occupation, removes a major source of Japanese irritation with the U.S., and puts some uncomfortable pressure on the Russians to do likewise with the extensive Japanese real estate (e.g., the Kuril Islands) they hold in the north...