Japanese Women

I have not been to war, but I know people who have. And their experiences were not pleasant.xTC When I was a teen-ager, an older guy on my block named Ronny went to Vietnam. Ronny came back in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the hips down, and he had the hollow-eyed, gaunt look that I now associate with the dying -- with victims of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or terminal cancer. Seated in his wheelchair, looking hunched and miserable like a haunted man, Ronny wore a leather bomber jacket bearing his unit's colors.

Kyoto, Japan -- Fifty years ago, on December 7, 1941, Japanese planes pierced the dawn to attack America at Pearl Harbor. That set into motion events that ultimately made America what, in U.N.-speak, is called the ''S.S.S'' -- Sole Surviving Superpower.But nothing stands still. Now revisionists ask: Could it be that Japan really won World War II? After all, haven't the Japanese been buying up America, decimating the American automobile industry, running massive trade surpluses while America runs massive trade deficits?

Classical music fans have a bad habit staying in a Western frame of mind, steeped in the sounds of mostly long-dead European composers, maybe allowing a few North and South American experiences for good measure. Music of the Orient rarely filters through such a mind-set, which makes this week's "Music of Japan Today 2003" festival and symposium exceptionally valuable. This enterprise by the Department of Music at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, running tomorrow through Sunday, is the largest of its kind in the country.

TOKYO -- Etsuko Murata, a 30-year-old assistant foreign exchange dealer, was explaining why she broke up with an American banker she had been dating."My friends assumed that the only reason a Japanese woman would date a white man was because she couldn't get sexual satisfaction with a Japanese," she said."

David Beckman, a World War II veteran and manufacturer of fountain syrups who attributed his longevity to eating kosher, died of heart failure April 19 at Sinai Hospital. The longtime Northwest Baltimore resident was 102. Mr. Beckman was born in Ukraine and settled in Baltimore with his family in 1906. His father, a pushcart merchant, moved the family to Hopewell, Va., on the eve of World War I, when he took a job with DuPont Co. In 1918, the family moved to Petersburg, Va., when the elder Mr. Beckman opened a grocery store, and then back to Baltimore a few years later when he established a grocery in the 1100 block of E. Pratt St. After completing his public school education, Mr. Beckman worked in his father's store and as a shoe salesman during the late 1920s and 1930s.

The Smithsonian Institution is known as America's attic. The Lacrosse Foundation could be called lacrosse's attic.Its Lacrosse Hall of Fame Museum, located in its headquarters on the Johns Hopkins University campus, has memorabilia ranging from 200-year-old Indian sticks and balls to jerseys of last year's college, club and junior champions."

"Choco Bon-Bon is five feet eight inches tall, weighs one hundred twenty-eight pounds, . . . " begins the fourth chapter of a just-published book about Japan. "He was born on May 4, 1967 -- or Showa 42 by the Japanese calendar."Mr. Bon-Bon, explains author Karl Taro Greenfeld, is the most sought-after male lead in the Japanese adult film video industry -- an industry that rivals microchips, compact cars and sushi in some segments of Japanese society.Another chapter in Mr. Greenfeld's book follows young Japanese women wearing plastic wrap dresses to Tokyo's discos, where males pay to ogle them.

WASHINGTON -- In the honor roll of aviation, the Smithsonian Institution is hallowed ground. Here are aircraft that changed the world -- flown by the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong.Next year another famous airplane will be added. It's the Enola Gay, the legendary B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and brought a swift and terrible end to World War II.But unlike the proud display accorded those other famous aircraft, officials at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum have more chilling plans for the Enola Gay. And that rankles a growing number of World War II veterans who wish to evoke the pride of their wartime sacrifice -- not have it overshadowed by gruesome photos of dead children and radiation victims.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- These were the Winter Olympics of politics and pressure. You could barely take a step without bumping into an athlete whose story was somehow intertwined with a country rising, falling or merging. And everywhere, as much a constant as snow in the mountains, there was pressure.The Olympics are always about pressure, of course. These athletes practice four years for defining moments that often last less than a minute. It's twisted logic impossible to reconcile, and it can shatter when joined by the burden of expectation.

WASHINGTON -- More Marines and Navy sailors were tried for rapes, child molestations and other sexual assaults at bases in Japan than at any other U.S. military site in the world.Computer records of Navy and Marine Corps cases since 1988 show that bases in Japan, which have a total of 41,008 personnel, held 169 courts-martial for sexual assaults. That's 66 percent more cases than the No. 2 location, San Diego, which had 102 cases and has 93,792 personnel.The No. 3 location, Norfolk, Va., had 90 courts-martial.