100 YEARS AGO
Monday, March 10, 1924
Japan nice but men dress in very queer ways
Of Japanese blood but American birth, education and ideas, a party of very pretty girls is now stopping at the Woman’s Home in Okubo, Tokyo, taking their first sights of Japan and the Japanese. They are Miss Toki and Miss Tai Miyakawa, sisters; Miss Sumire Okazaki and Miss Kimiyo Kimura, arrivals by the Kaga Maru on Sunday, intending to visit their Japanese relations.
After some preliminary consultation, in which they decided “to take a chance,” the fair quartette viewed, and this is the consensus of their expressed views:
Tokyo is wonderful. While they expected to find a city in ruins, they find one all rebuilt, with everybody cheerful and happy.
They are simply enraptured with the Japanese women in flowing kimono, but what in the world do they put so much face powder on for? Of course, it makes them look like dolls and is cute, but it must be an awful nuisance having to paint up so thoroughly all the time. In America we just carry around a handy powder rag and a lip stick, and fix up whenever we need to.
The way the Japanese women use purple in their clothing color schemes is most attractive, while the girls in America would simply jump at the chance to get that print mousseline in big flowers and checks, like the kind the Japanese flappers wear. It’s just the cat’s ankles.
Wouldn’t it be fun to have our hair fixed in that way, like a whisk upside-down, that you see so many women with. Oh, that’s the "shimada," is it. Only married women? Well, I guess that lets us out. But we could wear those long floppy sleeves, couldn’t we, without getting married?
Say, there’s one fierce thing in Japan we don’t like. That’s the public baths. Honest, I thought I would die when I went into one last night. But what are you going to do? We have to bathe, but it will be a long time before we go without being scared, I’ll tell the world.
On the ship coming over, we four girls had to take our baths all together. Of course, then, we could put the lights out and in the dark it wasn’t so bad. But here! Say, the more light there is in these public bath places, the more they seem to like it.
And laugh! Say, some of the Japanese men do dress in the funniest way. Hard hat on the head and wooden geta on bare feet. What do you know about that? And some of them, looking so proud, and wearing cloaks, just like women, and the fur boas they have.
But the worst are those men with bare legs who get right into the streetcars and don’t seem a bit ashamed of themselves. They wouldn’t last long like that in Seattle. I’m here to say.
And speaking of cops, why do the Japanese police let the streetcar company run their cars so full for? It must be dangerous. In America we wouldn’t let them get away with anything like that.
75 YEARS AGO
Tuesday, March 15, 1949
Emperor’s brothers enjoy square dancing in Hokkaido
From the atom-bombed hills of Nagasaki to the lonely snow-covered peaks of Hokkaido, a new cry is ringing out over Japan. It’s “Alaman right” and “Alaman left” and “Swing your partners” to the tunes of “Oh, Susannah” and “Little Brown Jug” as Nippon takes to square dance.
For the past couple of years square dancing was restricted to the southern islands but with the arrival in Sapporo of Winfield Niblo of Denver — who taught it in the south — the Hokkaidoans are dipping and whirling as earnestly as the rest.
“The rest” including Princes Takamatsu and Mikasa who came to Sapporo recently to view the Japanese ski meet and were persuaded by Mr. Niblo to visit one of his classes at the Municipal High School gymnasium.
As the six-piece City Hall Band hammered out “Nelly Gray” and “Golden Slippers” and 1,000 Sapporoans pushed and tugged each other around the cold hall, Mr. Niblo went to work on the Princes who are the Emperor’s brothers. The pair finally agreed to dance.
50 YEARS AGO
Wednesday, March 13, 1974
Onoda returns; meets parents
Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese World War II straggler, stepped out of a jetliner at Tokyo airport at 4:40 p.m. Tuesday to set his foot on the homeland for the first time in 29 years and two months. The plane touched down at 4:25 pm.
Onoda dressed in a charcoal-grey suit and white shirt and wearing a necktie, waved to crowds while beaming broadly as he stepped out of the plane.
The special chartered flight of the Japan Air Lines (JAL) from Manila arrived at Tokyo International Airport buzzing with reports that a man hijacked a JAL airbus en route to Naha.
On hand to greet the 51-year-old second lieutenant of the Imperial Japanese Army were his parents, Tanejiro, 86, and Tamae, 88, who was in a wheelchair, as well as his former classmates.
Also at the airport were Health and Welfare Minister Kunikichi Saito and hundreds of well-wishers who came to the airport bearing the national flag.
The well-wishers also included Motoji Shimada, 77, from Saitama Prefecture, an uncle of the late Cpl. Shoichi Shimada of the defunct Imperial Japanese Army, Onoda’s subordinate who was killed in an exchange of fire with Filipino patrols on Lubang in May 1954.
“I wish my nephew were back home alive. But anyway, it’s nice that Onoda is back,” he said.
25 YEARS AGO
Sunday, March 28, 1999
Out of options, homeless camp at City Hall
First-time visitors here to City Hall could be forgiven, thinking they’ve stumbled upon a spring festival.
For on the south side of the building are open-air tents, “enka” music playing from portable cassette recorders, and hundreds of people drinking beer and eating boxed lunches.
A closer inspection, however, reveals that virtually all of those present are men. And they are not here because they wish to be but because they are homeless and feel they have nowhere else to go.
Osaka now has the dubious distinction of having the most homeless people of any major city in Japan.
Officially, city bureaucrats say there are around 8,600 homeless, or twice that of Tokyo. Citizens’ groups that assist day-laborers, however, say the true figure is probably more than 10,000.
The number of homeless has been growing in recent years partly because local construction companies that many laborers had relied on for work are no longer hiring or are going bankrupt.
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