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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."