Word: peasant
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Tanaka and Osano first met in Tokyo during the immediate postwar period when both were scrambling for the top. Their durable friendship is largely based on their strikingly similar personalities. Both are blunt, decisive men of peasant stock in a society that has raised silken circumspection to an ethic. For all his swashbuckling, Osano's greatest assets are a prodigious capacity for work and an instinct for the well-timed business deal. For example, he was early in spotting his countrymen's wanderlust, and even before Japanese tourists began rushing to Hawaii, he invested in hotels there...
...role was one of the choicest movie plums in years: Catherine, the beguiling Shangri-La schoolmistress in the musical remake of Lost Horizon. The actress had to combine a peasant beauty with innate grace, be sweet yet sexy, and convey enough emotional depth to make Peter Finch-or any other man-willing to trudge over a snow-blown Himalaya for her. Audrey Hepburn was the sort of woman the part called for, and in fact Audrey was one of the prime prospects. But the part went to Liv Ullmann...
...farm 25 miles outside Warsaw, a ruddy-faced peasant pulled the cork from a home-distilled bottle of honey liquor and talked about the impact of Gierek's agriculture reform, in which a return to a free Western-style market has replaced central planning. One result: Polish farm income has risen 37% in the past year. Though 80% of Polish farm lands are still privately owned, the farmer during the Gomulka regime was a virtual serf to the state, which told him exactly what and how much to raise. Now a farmer is free to grow whatever sells best...
...Bunuel in his film mocks his own disgust at the corrupt and rigid structure of the Catholic Church. Though the sins of the clergy in this movie are venial and not carnal, they are still exposed. A bishop, on his way to give a dying man absolution, meets a peasant woman who whispers, "Father, I want to tell you something. I don't like Jesus Christ...Ever since I was a little child, I have hated him." Aghast, the bishop asks, "What? Such a kind, gentle God? How is this possible?" After the bishop administers the last sacraments...
Customary proportions of war were skewed, endowed with a wild irony. The greatest military power on earth brought all of its technology?all but the doomsday bombs?to bear on a peasant nation slightly larger than Florida. The smallest war, 9,000 miles from San Diego, became a national obsession that capsized a consensus President and undermined some of the most crucial American institutions?the military, the universities and, more broadly, the framework of authority itself, the sheer believability of Government...