The day dawns hopefully upon the town of Mito;
The sound of the hammer is heard clearly.
So ran one of 31,827 odes to daybreak entered last week in Japan's annual imperial poetry contest. The work of Emperor Hirohito himself, it was composed in a railway carriage enroute to the much-bombed town of Mito. The prizewinning poem (by a lesser author):
Fishing boats loaded with various fishes
Come into the bay at dawn.
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