To Nipponese newsgatherers, the most important man in Tokyo last week was not Prime Minister Yuko ("Shishi") Hamaguchi, making a remarkable recovery from an assassin's bullet fired fortnight ago (TIME, Nov. 24), but kinetic little Kiyoshi Tanabe, resolutely sitting on a factory smokestack.
Early in the week a mill near Tokyo's railway station closed down because of the general business depression, threw hundreds of factory hands out of work. Kiyoshi Tanabe, a railway flagman employed at the plant, ate a large meal, drank quantities of water, then kilting his short cotton jacket about him swarmed up the silent factory chimney...