JAPAN: Two Cities

Last week, TIME Correspondent Frank Gibney visited two Japanese cities—Osaka and Nagoya. His report:

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a tough, imperialistic warrior shogun, was the first Japanese to dream of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As an anchor for his international conquests, Hideyoshi chose Osaka, built a castle there in the latter part of the 16th Century. Hideyoshi and Osaka got along fine, and ever since then Osaka’s merchants have done their best to keep alive his spirit. They gambled when the gambling was good, hedged only when they had to. They became and remain to this day the financial lords of Japan.

A quarter of a century later, Hideyoshi’s successor as shogun, arch-isolationist Tokugawa Ieyasu, built a stronghold at Nagoya, 100 miles northeast of Osaka, Ieyasu wanted neither conquest nor foreign trade; he clamped the lid on Japan, and his family kept it there for 300 years. Like Osaka, Nagoya grew up in the image of its maker. Nagoyans put classical poems, flower arrangements and the complex subtleties of the Japanese tea ceremony ahead of commerce and industry; they dislike to hustle; there is still a feeling that trade is somewhat vulgar.

The difference between Osaka and Nagoya goes straight to the heart of the Japanese character. The Japanese are a people with a split personality, and Osaka and Nagoya are extreme examples of their duality. The Japan of Osaka is progressive, militant, competent, rude. The Japan of Nagoya is hidebound, passive, polite and wary of outside influences.

Ghosts in the Summer. During the war, U.S. bombing strikes destroyed 300,000 of Osaka’s houses, left only 10% of its factories working. Now, four years later, Osakans already have built 100,000 new dwellings; 9,300 factories are back in operation, sending steel pipe to Arabia, chinaware to the U.S., locomotives to Russia and Siam, textiles to Nigeria, Hong Kong, Pakistan and the Middle East.

On Osaka’s sleek, well-run subways, sweating crowds pour downtown during the early morning commuting hours. Many of the men wear shorts and Frank Buck-style pith helmets; Osaka’s prostitutes are almost the only women who still wear the traditional Japanese kimonos; girl office workers do the best they can in makeshift “new look” dresses.

Outside the huge, modernistic kabuki theater, audiences queued up eagerly last week to see the annual ghost play, traditionally presented in the summer on the theory that the chill of a horror story will mitigate the heat (this year’s thriller features a Japanese officer who murders his disfigured wife and is stalked by her ghost through two subsequent acts).

Despite the business-and-fun-as-usual, Osaka, like the rest of Japan, is suffering from severe economic cramps. Last winter, government subsidies were cut drastically and Japanese industry had to stand on its feet or collapse. Osaka unhesitatingly initiated harsh “rationalization” measures, including longer working hours and some firings.

Kick from Behind. Osaka’s Communists tried but failed to make capital of the “rationalization” firings, thanks largely to the vigilance of the city’s hefty, even-tempered police chief, 49-year-old Eiji Suzuki. Chief Suzuki started his regime by cleaning up Osaka’s formidable gangs of thugs and black-marketeers. When the Communists began making trouble, he went after them with equal vigor. Last July, when a Communist-published kabe shimbun (wall newspaper) published stories charging G.I.s with attacking Japanese women, Suzuki saw his chance. Under an Army directive forbidding falsification of news about the occupation, he jugged 108 Reds, including many of Osaka’s Communist officials.

Suzuki, who hates right-wing extremists as well as Communists, has learned fast what many people never realize about the Communists. Says he: “The Communists are like small children breaking a toy, but unlike the children, they are not innocent; their tactics are those of wartime; they are warlike criminals. They are resolved to get power no matter by what means, and I am just as resolved to check them. In Japan today, the general tendency is that a person must be kicked front behind before he moves forward. Since I move forward without any pushing, I am accused of going too far.”

The Beautiful Bombing. Nagoya, which suffered as much from wartime bombing as Osaka, is as different from Osaka as Boston’s Back Bay is from Reno, Nev. Instead of Osaka’s new houses, bustling factories, Nagoya boasts huge areas of rubble-littered ground and rotting weeds dotted with an occasional clapboard shack. The ruins of her factories, which Nagoyans had accepted reluctantly as part of the war, stretch as far as the eye can see.

Long-faced, buck-toothed Kameo Sadaki, caretaker of the ruined debris of the Aichi torpedo plant, shook his head, said with Nagoya’s curious local pride: “We had almost 25,000 workers here. In five minutes, nothing was left. No factory in Japan was so beautifully bombed.” The Aichi plant, which was 95% destroyed, is being sold for scrap metal to anyone that will carry it away. Youngish Toshio Takahashi, the plant manager, says softly: “It still seems like a dream to see all this. I suppose we should tear it down quickly, but that would cost too much money.”

Osaka, which is Japan’s No. 1 commercial city, grew naturally with the progressive expansionism of her hustling merchants. Nagoya, industrially the child of the Greater East Asia War, grew artificially, by military fiat. Fifty-five-year-old Junji Hattori, manager of a Mitsubishi plant in Nagoya, put it this way: “When the military sticks its nose into civilian affairs, it makes horrible mistakes. Look at us now—no money, no initiative, no incentive. I’m afraid Nagoya’s flower has bloomed and withered. Whether new buds will appear, only time will tell.”

But even though Nagoya’s sleepy isolation and commercial torpor are worlds away from the energetic, expansionist drive of Osaka, the problems that the two cities have to face are largely the same. Japan must live on its exports. To export profitably, it must change its trade patterns, send heavy machinery where it once sent textiles, step up its export of bicycles, eventually export airplanes. Japanese managers and engineers must pull up their socks and streamline their subsidy-softened industries.

The Japanese who must put forth this supreme effort, however, have first to conquer their national schizophrenia, to achieve a union between the descendants of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu. Osaka and Nagoya must somehow be put together if Japan is to survive.