Word: yokoi
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...more practical level, Yokoi is confused by the decline in the value of the yen; his previous monthly army pay, 20 yen, is one two-thousandth of the pay for the same rank today. "Before the war," he laments, "I could have a perfectly satisfying evening out on a mere 10-yen note. Now you might spend 10,000 yen and the geisha will still say no." Yokoi is increasingly concerned about how he will earn those yen. "If I turn tailor again, as I was before the war, I would only go broke; I would be disqualified from...
Meanwhile, Yokoi is at loose ends. He gets up at 4 a.m., as he did in the jungle, takes walks, and spends hours weeding the yard in front of the house he shares with his brother-in-law. (Never married, he has no other close relative.) With part of the $80,000 he has received from the government and from well-wishers, he has bought land and plans to build a house. He hopes to write his memoirs of the Battle of Guam and visit the families of his dead comrades-in-arms. "Then I might be able to settle...
Despite his incredible ordeal, Yokoi proved to be in remarkably good health. While resting in a Guam hospital, he told reporters about his experience as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe. "At first," he said, "there were ten of us, lying low and dodging the enemy." One by one, the others died or gave themselves up, and for the past eight years Yokoi had to fend for himself. He kept time by marking a "calendar" tree at each full moon. Food in the jungle was plentiful, and he survived on a diet of mangoes, nuts, crabs, prawns, snails, rats, eels, pigeons...
...Yokoi was quite bewildered by his sudden return to civilization. He knew vaguely what jets were-"those strange planes whose wings are all swept back"-but he had not known that the emperor whom he had served so faithfully was now a mere mortal instead of a god. One of Yokoi's first questions to reporters was on a political matter: "Tell me one thing quick: Is Roosevelt dead?" The ex-sergeant burst into tears when told that his mother had died...
...Yokoi became an instant hero in Japan, and he will be given a triumphal welcome this week in Tokyo, and later in his hometown of Nagoya, where there is a tombstone bearing his name in a graveyard. The Japanese government offered Yokoi a $320 cash token of sympathy-his accrued back pay amounts to only about $129-and chartered a jet to fly him home. Thousands of Japanese citizens have come forward with gifts, ranging from job proposals to electric blankets and a lifetime pass to a hotel's bath. All in all, Yokoi may find modern life...