Word: tokyo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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False Addresses. While the Household Board worked away at its list, Japan's major newspapers set up "special sections" of 30 to 170 staffmen to pry out the favorites. The papers knew that all the eligible girls would be past or present students at the Gakushuin, the Tokyo peers' school. Armed with pocket cameras, reporters followed girls to school, trailed them when they went home at night. One paper smuggled a woman reporter into the school disguised as a student. Another tried to get a list of all girls enrolled-something that is by tradition kept secret...
...Japanese custom got a new-and somewhat surprising-raking-over in Tokyo last week. On display at the Shirokiya Department Store went more than 70 foreign-made products alongside Japanese copies so cleverly done that only an expert could tell which twin had the patent right. The purpose: a campaign by the Japanese government to shame businessmen out of pirating foreign designs. Said the Ministry of International Trade: "This exhibit is an appeal to the Japanese people's conscience...
...aged 38, Japanese Novelist Osamu Dazai committed suicide by jumping into Tokyo's Tamagawa Reservoir. It was Dazai's fifth attempt, but he had long courted self-destruction in alcoholism and morphine addiction. The son of a rich landowning family, Novelist Dazai was deeply, perhaps disastrously, Westernized. The title of his first novel, The Setting Sun, provided a tag line ("people of the setting sun") for postwar Japanese disillusionment and class disintegration. Spare, evocative and heavily autobiographical, Dazai's novels are monochromes of despair. Their only affirmation is the fact that the author took the trouble...
...sole emotion the hero of No Longer Human feels is a horror of other humans. As a boy, Yozo has merely to watch the rest of the family of ten devour its food to lose his own appetite. When his father asks Yozo what present he wants from Tokyo, his first impulse is to answer: "Nothing." ("The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference.") To mask his apartness, the youngster feels that he must play the clown, wins from his schoolmates the title of "Harold Lloyd of Northeast Japan...
...college in Tokyo, a coarse painter friend introduces Yozo to "the mysteries of drink, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops and left-wing thought." For a young man whose will is as weak as his life drive, this strange combination paves the road to the lower depths. Yozo has an affair with a waitress, but fluffs his end of their suicide pact. Scrabbling for a living as a second-rate cartoonist, he is kept, for a time, by a woman journalist. To keep himself in cheap gin, the cartoonist sinks to pornography. Toward novel's end, Yozo is even ready to make...