The Book Week of Japan

The Book Week of Japan

The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper of Japan has revealed a survey result on authors whose works are the most read by the general public as the book week of Japan will start from October 27.

1. Keigo Higashino

2. Ryotaro Shiba

3. Haruki Murakami

4. Seicho Matsumoto

5. Hiroyuki Itsuki

6. Miyuki Miyabe

7. Syotaro Ikenami

8. Kyotaro Nishimura

9. Naoki Uchida

10. Syuhei Fujisawa

11. Jun Ikeido

12. Jakucho Setouchi

13. Junichi Watanabe

14. Mariko Hayashi

15. Jiro Akagawa

16. Osamu Dazaiji

17. Kotaro Isaka

18. Soseki Natsume

19. Jiro Asada

20. Hiroshi Arikawa

21. Seiichi Morimura

22. Eiji Yoshikawa

However, according to the survey, those Japanese who read a book or more in a recent month account for 46%.  Since 1995, this ratio has been around 50%, but this time it shows the lowest level.  Japanese people have come to have less time for reading a book.  One of reasons is apparently an influence of wider and exhaustive use of smart phones, especially, among young people.

The genre Japanese male readers prefer the most is historical fictions or period novels.  The genre Japanese females like the most is cooking and dietary life.

In Japan total sales of published matters are estimated to be about $18 billion. (The US publishing trade records $23 billion of sales per year.)  There are 3,400 different magazines issued yearly, monthly, weekly or so on.  The number of books newly issued every year is about 75,000.  (In America more than 180,000 published matters are delivered every year.)

But do any foreigners read Japanese books?


The Number of Learners of the Japanese Language in the World: 

1.  China       1,046,490

2.  Indonesia     872,406

3.  S.Korea       840,187

4.  Australia      296,672

5.  Taiwan        232,967

6.  US              155,939

7.  Thailand      129,616

8.  Vietnam        46,762

9.  Malaysia       33,077

10. Philippine     32,418


Good or bad, it looks like Chinese that can understand Japanese minds and hearts more than any foreigners, since Japan and China share many kanji characters and knowledge of ancient Chinese classics.




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A Shinto Shrine around Tokyo

Latest Dose Levels within Fukushima Daiichi

Latest Dose Levels within Fukushima Daiichi

It is two years and seven months after the great natural disaster of an M9.0 earthquake and tsunamis of March 11, 2011.  But the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident is yet to be fully fixed since they cannot still find specifically where melted-down nuclear fuel is now under the three crippled nuclear reactors in the plant.

Cooling water is still being circulated through the crippled reactors.  But as those reactors and reactor buildings are broken radioactively contaminated water leaks into the ground under the reactor buildings.  They pumped out contaminated and leaked water into special tanks but some of it apparently flows into the sea.

Now let's see how much dosage people are now receiving in major cities north of Tokyo on Honsyu Island, since Fukushima Daiichi is situated 220 km northeast of Tokyo.    


Dose Levels as of October 18, 2013

City               Dose (uSv/hour)
--------------------------------------

Morioka          0.023

Sendai           0.048

Fukushima     0.31

Utsunomiya   0.044

Mito              0.044

Saitama        0.041

Ichihara (Chiba)            0.031

Shinjuku (Tokyo)          0.035

Chigasaki (Kanagawa)  0.040

http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/country/japan.html


Specifically within Fukushima Prefecture where the Fukushima Daiichi plant is situated:

Dose Levels as of October 18, 2013

City/Town/Village      Dose (uSv/hour)
--------------------------------------

Fukushima                  0.31

Iidate                         0.66

Minami-soma             0.14

Namie                       2.38

Koriyama                  0.16

Aizuwakamatsu         0.07

Iwaki                         0.08


For example, the dosage in Fukushima City 0.31 uSv means 2.7 mSv per year.  The Japanese Government sets the allowable radiation limit for primary school children at 20 mSv with a standard target of 1 mSv.  So, it is not very safe for children living around Fukushima City, some 70 km west of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Recently a Japanese reporter visited Chernobyl to measure a radiation level around the broken nuclear power plant covered by huge concrete walls and slabs.  A measurement device showed 5.24 uSv.  But at two special locations  in the Fukushima Daiichi plant, they measured 1800 mSv per hour in this summer.

So, Fukushima Daiichi is still the most dangerous place in Japan, though about 3000 workers are engaged in recover work every day in the premises of the plant.


Latest Dose Levels within Fukushima Daiichi Plant (by Tokyo Electric Power Co.)

 http://www.tepco.co.jp/nu/fukushima-np/f1/index-j.html

Measurement was done at eight locations named PM-1 to PM-8.




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  Shinjuku, Tokyo

Assistant Teacher-Turned Author

Assistant Teacher-Turned Author

There was a Japanese author who was highly made much of after WWII as he wrote some works which appealed to feeling of Japanese who were suffering severe conditions of living in the land half scorched by US air raids during the war.

He happened to become an assistant teacher of a branch school of a primary school in Tokyo in early 1920s.   The branch school was situated near Shimo-kitazawa, Setagaya Ward, Tokyo.  Shimo-kitazawa today is one of the most popular towns not only for young people but also for citizens who love unique culture of this commercial district close to an uptown residential area of Tokyo.  The district is full of shops, office buildings, apartments, and so on without no vacant space.

But 80 years ago, there were mostly paddy fields, farms, and forests in addition to some farm houses and a small commercial street around Shimo-kitazawa.

There the assistant teacher met and taught children mostly from poor farm households.  Though he just worked there for three years, he experienced various aspects of  humanity through communications with poor school boys and girls.

And the most impressive thing he wrote about his experience is that a boy or a girl could be unhappy because he or she was not loved.  For a child, receiving no love is the greatest cause for unhappiness.

Ango Sakaguchi (1906 – 1955) was a Japanese novelist and essayist. 

From Niigata, Sakaguchi was one of a group of young Japanese writers to rise to prominence in the years immediately following Japan's defeat in World War II. In 1946 he wrote his most famous essay, titled "Darakuron" ("On Decadence"), which examined the role of bushido during the war. It is widely argued that he saw postwar Japan as decadent, yet more truthful than a wartime Japan built on illusions like bushido. 

Works available in English:
“Sensô to hitori no onna” (1946). Transl. by Lane Dunlop as “One Woman and the War” in Autumn Wind and Other Stories. Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1994, 140-160. 

“Hakuchi” (1946). Transl. by George Saitô as “The Idiot” in Modern Japanese Stories, ed. by Ivan Morris. Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1962, 383-410. 

“Sakura no mori no mankai no shita” (1947). Trans. by Jay Rubin as “In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom” in The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, ed. by Theodore W. Goossen. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 187~205.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ango_Sakaguchi   

Sakaguchi wrote that the Empire of Japan had the first-rate military power before WWII though the living standard of its people was of the fourth class in the global standard.  So, he thought it was not so strange that Japan exhausted and lost its military power through the wars against China, the US, and eventually the Soviet Union in WWII.  As with living standard of the people, the nation naturally came to have the fourth-rate or less military power due to the defeat.

This sentiment was probably shared by most of the Japanese people after WWII.  That is why Japan still sticks to the Pacifist Constitution enacted in 1947, though its contents were based on strong advice from General MacArthur who occupied and governed Japan after WWII till 1951.




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Tokyo Tower since 1958

A Granddaughter of Mitsubishi Founder

A Granddaughter of Mitsubishi Founder

The Mitsubishi company syndicate was established by Yataro Iwasaki (1835-1885).  His eldest son Hisaya Iwasaki (1865-1955) also led the Mitsubishi industrial conglomerate.

Before WWII, there were 10 or so zaibatsu (industrial conglomerate) groups in Japan.   Mitsubishi zaibatsu is one of them.  These business groups in total accounted for 35.2% in terms of a ratio of capital paid-in by all the businesses in the Empire of Japan.  So, the Iwasaki family was super rich.

Hisaya Iwasaki had a daughter called Miki (1901-1980).  She was expected marry a son of a super rich family or a prominent politician.  But she tried to be a Christian and married a Christian diplomat named Renzo Sawada in 1922.  Then Miki Sawada traveled and lived in various cities, such as Buenos Aires, Beijing, London, Paris, New York, etc. between 1923 and 1936. She got many friends abroad, including an African-American singer Josephine Baker.

During WWII, Miki was in Japan, but she was regraded as a pro-American Japanese to be put under scrutiny by the special police.   After the war ended in 1945, she started to take care of orphan children each of whom was born between a Japanese mother and a US soldier. She built a children's nursing home, called Elizabeth Saunders Home, in premises of her vacation house in Oiso Town, on Sagami Bay facing the Pacific Ocean.

What served as the catalyst of her action was her encounter with a dead baby with the black skin.  When she was in a crowded train running toward Tokyo one day after WWII, something fell on her from a rack of a car.  It was a dead infant wrapped in newspaper sheets.  Then police came to check the incident.  But they doubted whether Miki was the mother of the dead baby apparently from a Japanese woman and an Africa-American soldier.  Though it was later found that there was a Japanese woman in the train who was the mother of the dead baby, this happening moved Miki so deeply.  She thought it was a sign from Heaven.  Accordingly, she decided to take care of those unhappy infants who were born between Japanese women and American soldiers.

She used her won funds to build the Home, but she also asked contribution from people in various sectors not only in Japan but also in foreign countries.  Miki named the Home after one of British contributors: Elizabeth Saunders.  Miki nursed and brought up total 2,000 children who were abandoned by their parents.

However it is said that her House was not welcomed for some time after its establishment.  Both the Japanese Government and the US military authorities stationed in Japan after WWII did not like to recognize existence of orphans of mixed blood between Japanese women and US soldiers. So, in 1949 Miki and her husband traveled to the US to solicit for a contribution. Miki Sawada met an American actress Grace Patricia Kelly who became a friend of the Sawadas'.   In 1953 Miki founded a primary school and a junior-high school for children living in Elizabeth Saunders Home.

As time went by her humanitarian work came to be widely known to the Japanese public. Even a movie was made about children living in her facilities. Miki Sawada, a grand-daughter of the founder of the Mitsubishi company syndicate of Japan, died of a heart disease in Mallorca, Spain, in 1980 during her lecture tour in Spain.

http://www.mitsubishi.com/j/history/series/man/man23.html

It is estimated today that the Mitsubishi Group has total assets of $2 trillion while the Toyota Group $300 billion.  But it is unknown how much a granddaughter of the founder of Mitsubishi zaibatsu accumulated in Heaven.



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National Stadium, Tokyo, Venue of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

Tokai No.2 Nuclear Plant

Tokai No.2 Nuclear Plant

The Tokai No.2 Power Station is situated 110km northeast of Tokyo as one of the closest nuclear power plants to Tokyo.

http://www.tokyo-np.co.jp/article/shuin2012/all/CK2012120102100019.html
Tokai No.2 Power Station


This power plant also faced a grave crisis due to the M9.0 earthquake and big tsunamis on March 11, 2011, as with the Fukushima Daiichi (No.1) Power Station located 220 km northeast of Tokyo.  But this plant in Ibaraki Prefecture could get rid of an accident, thus causing no nuclear disaster to Tokyo.

http://image.search.yahoo.co.jp/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=top_ga1_sa&p=%E6%9D%B1%E6%B5%B7%E7%AC%AC%E4%BA%8C+%E5%8E%9F%E7%99%BA++%E8%B7%9D%E9%9B%A2+%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC#mode%3Ddetail%26index%3D47%26st%3D1680
Locations of Nuclear Power Generation Plants in Japan


The plant has a BWR nuclear reactor made by GE and Hitachi with ability to provide 1.1 million kW of electricity.  It started operation in November 1978.  However its operation is now suspended due to periodic inspection without any plan to resume its operation in any near future like so many other nuclear reactors in Japan in the aftermath of the 3.11 Disaster and the Fukushima Daiichi accident.

The head of the Tokai No.2 Plant recently commented in a symposium on why they could prevent a nuclear accident on and after March 11, 2011.   The plant head Mochida pointed to three conditions for their success in managing the plant against the natural disaster of a scale which can be observed only once in 1000 years in Japan:

1.  They had already built protective walls around the Tokai No.2 Station standing on the North Pacific Ocean like the Fukushima Daiichi No.1 Plant.  They had studied a possibility of future tsunami hazards.  Accordingly, they built 6.1-meter high coast levees which could eventually stand against a 5.4 meter tsunami on March 11, 2011.  With these walls they could secure sea-water pumps which provided cooling water to the nuclear reactor after the tsunami.

2. They learnt a lesson from the 2004 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake which halted temporarily operation of the Kashiwazaki Nuclear Power Plant located on the Sea of Japan.  Following a review of the earthquake, they introduced gas turbine generators into  the Tokai No.2 Station.  This auxiliary generators could provide electricity for the Station after the M9.0 earthquake and tsunamis which knocked down external power supply to the Tokai facilities.  So, the Tokai Station could continue cooling of the nuclear reactor by operating pumps after the occurrence of the natural disaster.

3. They had good relationships with various providers and business partners.  Those companies helped the Tokai No.2 Station at the time of the great crisis on and after March 11, 2011.  In such emergency situations, the Station needed extra manpower, equipment, and services.  But those friendly businesses offered big aid and support despite danger of a possible nuclear accident.

Indeed, these three conditions were what was fatally lacked in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant which is located 100 km north of the Tokai No.2 Station.

Conversely, if the Tokai No.2 Station could not fulfill the above three conditions, it should have been crippled like Fukushima Daiichi.  And in this case the Tokyo Metropolitan Area must have suffered a very grave situation.

The following map shows possible radiation contamination in a case that the Tokai No.2 Station should be damaged to leak radioactive substance to the air like the Fukushima Daiichi Plant.

http://fkuoka.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-247.html
Possible Situation of Tokai No.2 Station Damaged like Fukushima Daiichi

In this case, radioactive hazards would cover Ibaraki, Chiba, Saitama Prefectures north and east of Tokyo Prefecture on Tokyo Bay.   So, most of businesses in Tokyo must have been affected badly, and tens of thousands of Tokyo residents must have evacuated.  Probably all the foreigners living in Tokyo would run away in a panic while the Narita International Airport should stop its service.  We were really very lucky to have good management in  the Tokai No.2 Station on March 2011.

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Tokyo toward North

Two Japanese Pirates

Two Japanese Pirates

One of the most prominent Europeans the Japanese people are taught in schools even today is  Francisco de Xavier

In August 1549, Francisco de Xavier (1506-1552) landed on Kagoshima, the most southern part of Kyusyu Island of mainland Japan.

Francis Xavier was a Roman Catholic missionary born in Xavier, Kingdom of Navarre (now part of Spain), and co-founder of the Society of Jesus. He was a student of Ignatius of Loyola and one of the first seven Jesuits, dedicated at Montmartre in 1534.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Xavier

In January 1551 Xavier traveled to Kyoto where the emperor of Japan lived, though Japan was at the time in decades-long armed conflicts among feudal lords who occupied their own fiefs while the emperor had almost no territories except the palace in Kyoto.  What was worse, the samurai shogun, a kind of king for all the samurai clans, had also lost his authority and political power at the time.  So, Xavier stayed for only 11 days in Kyoto and returned to western Japan.

 However a feudal lord who ruled the Yamaguchi region, the most western part of Honsyu Island, the largest island of mainland Japan, was very compassionate to  Xavier.  So, mostly around this region, Xavier was engaged in preaching.  He could finally convert 700 Japanese to Christians.   Then he left Japan for India where he had preached the gospel before coming to Japan.  

Xavier thought that in order to succeed in missionary work in Japan it was necessary to succeed in China, since China had strong influential power on Japan in terms of culture.  (Buddhism was imported to Japan through China.)  But Xavier died in 1552 in an island off the Chinese Continent.  His dead body was sent to Goa, India, to be enshrined.  

Then Francisco Cabral (1529-1609) came to Japan as the head of Catholic missionaries in Japan in 1570.  He also preached in western Japan.  When he tried to travel to Kyoto from the Yamaguchi region, he became ill at a port town, called Iwakuni, facing the Inland Sea.  There was only one Christian family in the town, so that the Cabral band became at a loss.  But a pirate came to help him.  He took Cabral to his home and cared for the foreign priest for 20 days.

Cabral asked this kind pirate whether he would convert to Christianity. Then the pirate replied that when more and more Japanese came to believe in Christianity and the king of Japan permitted the religion, he would be a Christian. 

So, when he recovered, Cabral and his group left for Kyoto on a ship piloted by the pirate.  Cabral further traveled to the Gifu region where the then rising samurai lord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) governed.  Nobunaga helped Western missionaries preach the gospel in Japan.  Nobunaga also loved to buy and get Western goods from Portuguese and Spanish merchants.

Then a decade later Oda Nobunaga conquered one third of Japan as he made the best use of matchlock guns Portuguese merchants had brought into Japan in 1543.  He even controlled the emperor who lived in Kyoto without military and administrative power.  Now it was expected that Nobunaga would soon rule entire Japan even if he could not replace the emperor.

In 1579, Nobunaga built a big castle, called Azuchi-jyo on Lake Biwa, 20 km north of Kyoto.  He allowed Christian missionaries to build a school in the town surrounding the castle. Nobunaga hated some factions of Buddhists and killed thousands of armed Buddhist monks in battles, which was one of reasons for his strong support for Western missionaries.

But in 1582 Nobunaga was assassinated at the Hon-no-ji Temple in Kyoto by one of his generals named Akechi Mitsuhide.  Nobunaga then had only 100 samurais in the Temple where he temporarily stayed, but Mitsughide was leading 13,000 troops as he had been ordered by Nobunaga to march to western Japan and join battles against anti-Nobunaga samurai lords.        This incident is called "Hon-no-ji no hen" in Japanese, since it is one of the biggest betrayal cases in the Japanese history.   Anyway citizens and samurais living in Azuchi got into a panic.  Samurai troops led by Mitsuhide were approaching Azuchi.

Christians and priests in the school of Azuchi were also driven by fear.  They decided to flee to a small island in Lake Biwa.  And conveniently a fisherman came to them offering help.  He said he would take them to the island with his boat.  But one priest found that this kind man was actually a pirate.  He planned to rob Christians of money and assets on the boat.

Still luckily, one of Japanese Christians working in the school had a relative who was a friend of samurai general Mitsuhide.  So, they asked help from samurais of the Akechi force coming into Azuchi.  The pirate ran away and they were saved, though the great castle and the town of Azuchi were burnt down.

Finally after various incidents, Christianity was banned by the Tokugawa samurai shogun in the early 17th century.  However it is estimated that those Western missionaries converted almost a million Japanese into Christianity in 60 years since Xavier landed on Kagoshima in 1549.  Nonetheless, in the middle of the 17th century the official number of Japanese Christians dropped to zero due to the law to prohibit Christianity.

In conclusion, whether or not Christianity prevailed in Japan, there were both a good pirate and a bad pirate.  The issue at point might not be on so-called religion.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AE%89%E5%9C%9F%E5%9F%8E
Azuchi Castle of Nobunaga





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Mt. Fuji Today, 100 km Far

Emperor of the Empire of Japan

Emperor of the Empire of Japan

The big difference between Japan and the US is existence of the emperor in Japan.

The big difference between Japan and China is existence of the emperor in Japan.

But how have the Japanese people regraded the emperor?

Today generally speaking the existence of the emperor has no influence on Japanese individuals when they think of their life and death or their life styles or jobs.  But they think that showing respect for the emperor and imperial family members mean acting as respectable members of society.

But this attitude toward the emperor was only established after WWII and after enactment of the new Japanese Constitution in 1947.  However during the samurai era which continued till 1867 since the late 12th century, the emperor was deprived of real political power by samurai leaders.  Farmers in local villages paid customs or tax, namely mostly rice, not to officials sent by the emperor who lived in Kyoto but to samurai lords who governed or administered regions including their villages.  The emperor had no military forces in the 700-year-long Samurai Age.  Or essentially the samurai class had grown from soldiers who had once belonged to the emperor or noblemen.

Accordingly villagers and townsmen in the samurai era had neither enough knowledge  about the emperor nor appropriate chances to show respect for the emperor.

Then a big change happened in the history of Japan as western powers started to request by force opening of the nation Japan in the middle of the 19th century though the samurai regime had closed the country for almost 250 years.

But in the Empire of Japan, the political system that existed from 1868 to 1945, the emperor was a almost nominally autocratic ruler of Japan.  It is because politicians, military leaders and elite bureaucrats of the Empire needed such a super monarch in Japan so as to govern the Japanese people under the name of the emperor peremptorily.  As most of those elites in the Empire were ex-samurais or descendants of samurais, they thought they belonged to a class higher than ordinary people of the Empire who had belonged to the farmer class or the townsman class during the samurai era.  So, it is fit for them to set the emperor as a despot who presided at the highest position in the Japanese social stratum.

Nonetheless, there was a serious dispute about characteristics of the emperor as a (mostly nominal) despot.  Was he above the legal system of Japan like a kind of god, or was he just one function under the Imperial Constitution?

Dispute over "Emperor as an Organ of Government Theory" 

The theory of the Emperor as an organ of government (the theory of the nation state as a juridical body) that the Emperor is an organ of the state possessing no authority over and above the state, who exercised power only as the highest organ of the state was widely accepted as an academic construct legally underpinning the Meiji Constitution system. At a plenary session of the House of Peers on 18 February 1935 (Showa 10), however, KIKUCHI Takeo vehemently attacked the theory, criticizing the works of constitutional scholar MINOBE Tatsukichi and others. In response, MINOBE, who was also a member of the House of Peers, made a strong "personal defense" of the theory at the plenary session one week later, on 25 February 1935. Sensing opportunity, nationalist groups and others pounced on the issue and started a campaign to discredit the "Emperor as an Organ of Government Theory". The movement to denounce the theory grew in intensity when the Seiyukai, which wanted to overturn the Cabinet, was joined by large segments of the military and local government groups.
http://www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/cha4/description04.html  

In 1912, Minobe published a work on constitutional interpretation, which came to be known as the “emperor organ theory”. Per Minobe, the “State”, or kokutai was supreme, and even the emperor was only an “organ of the State” as defined through the constitutional structure, rather than a sacred power beyond the state itself....

Minobe’s interpretation of the constitution was generally accepted by bureaucrats and even imperial household until the 1930s, although it had been challenged from the beginning by imperial absolutists such as Yatsuka Hoizumi and Shinkichi Uesugi, who held that the emperor was, by definition, the personification of the State itself, and therefore politically unaccountable for his actions, however arbitrary, as defined in Article 3 the Meiji Constitution.

In the increasingly militant environment of the 1930s, Minobe’s liberal interpretation of the role of the emperor came under attack from military officers and ultranationalists increasingly disillusioned by liberal democracy and corruption in government, which they felt could only be addressed through a Shōwa Restoration in which the emperor would take personal totalitarian control. On February 18, 1935, Baron Takeo Kikuchi, a retired general and member of the House of Peers, launched a public campaign to demand that Prime Minister Keisuke Okada ban Minobe’s works, which he termed to be “traitorous thoughts”.[3] Minobe addressed the Diet of Japan a week later in his own defense, while right-wing groups and Kōdōha officers held a demonstration in downtown Tokyo denouncing him. In early March, Major General Genkuro Eto charged in the lower house of the Diet of Japan that Minobe’s books, specifically Kenpo Satsuyo (Compendium of the Constitution) and Tsuiho kenpo seigi (Additional Commentaries on the Constitution) were works of lese-majeste, and that Minobe should be arrested.[4] Bowing to severe political pressure, Okada asked Minobe to resign from his posts later that month, banned some of his works, and initiated a government-sponsored campaign to discredit his works in favor of the tenets supporting the concept of the divine right of the emperor, which quickly merged with emperor worship and national chauvinism.[5]

Following the surrender of Japan after World War II, Minobe was active as an advisor in the creation of the post-war Constitution of Japan, as well as an advisor to the Privy Council.[6] He died in 1948.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatsukichi_Minobe

Nonetheless, Showa Emperor who presided over Japan through WWII once said that he did not think any part of his status had changed before and after  WWII.  The father of the present emperor stressed that he always acted in the same manner even despite the change of the Constitution after the defeat of the Empire in 1945.

http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/j1bkk/31458438.html
Imperial Family of Showa Emperor in 1941





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Around Akihabara Railroad Station, Tokyo