Word: suda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Just Crazy. The dakkochan is the brainchild of Yoshihiro Suda, 27, planning chief for Japan's toymaking Tsukudaya Co. Last February Suda began experimenting with a U.S. made plastic-and-cardboard eye that appears to wink whenever the angle at which light hits it is changed. Suda placed the come-hither eye in a 12-in. doll made of black sheet plastic inflated with air. Besides its stubby, clinging arms, the dakkochan boasts ring-shaped ears, a red doughnut mouth and a plastic grass skirt. Girl dakkochans can be told from boy dakkochans by the fact that the girls...
...first Suda was not too optimistic about the sales of his doll. Today, with a raging boom on his hands, he says: "The whole thing is crazy." But Japanese intellectuals, who can be pretty crazy themselves, have been quick to discover social significance in the dakkochan's black skin. Citing the growing popularity of Negro jazz. Artist Setsu Nagasawa argues that "a Negro culture wave seems to be sweeping Japanese youth." Novelist Tensei Kawano, who has featured Negroes in four books, asserts: "We of the younger generation are outcasts from politics and society. In a way we are like...