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.