- American George Weller was the first foreign reporter
to enter Nagasaki following the U.S. atomic attack on the city on Aug.
9, 1945. Weller wrote a series of stories about what he saw in the city,
but censors at the Occupation's General Headquarters refused to allow the
material to be printed. Weller's stories, written in September 1945, can
be found below.
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- NAGASAKI, Sept.8 -- The atomic
bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately,
but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such
a gigantic force could be expected to be.
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- The following conclusions were made by the writer - as
the first visitor to inspect the ruins - after an exhaustive, though still
incomplete study of this wasteland of war.
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- Nagasaki is an island roughly resembling Manhattan in
size and shape, running in north and south direction with ocean inlets
on both sides, what would be the New Jersey and Manhattan sides of the
Hudson river are lined with huge-war plants owned by the Mitsubishi and
Kawanami families.
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- The Kawanami shipbuilding plants, employing about 20,000
workmen, lie on both sides of the harbor mouth on what corresponds to battery
park and Ellis island. That is about five miles from the epicenter of the
explosion.
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- B-29 raids before the Atomic bomb failed to damage them
and they are still hardly scarred.
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- Proceeding up the Nagasaki harbor, which is lined with
docks on both sides like the Hudson, one perceives the shores narrowing
toward a bottleneck. The beautiful green hills are nearer at hand, standing
beyond the long rows of industrial plants, which are all Mitsubishi on
both sides of the river.
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- On the left, or Jersey side, two miles beyond the Kawanami
yards are Mitsubishi's shipbuilding and electrical engine plants employing
20,000 and 8,000 respectively. The shipbuilding plant damaged by a raid
before the atomic bomb, but not badly. The electrical plant is undamaged.
It is three miles from the epicenter of the atomic bomb and repairable.
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- It is about two miles from the scene of the bomb's 1,500
feet high explosion where the harbor has narrowed to 250 foot wide Urakame
River that the atomic bomb's force begins to be discernible.
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- This area is north of downtown Nagasaki, whose buildings
suffered some freakish destruction, but are generally still sound.
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- The railroad station, destroyed except for the platforms
is already operating. Normally it is sort of a gate to the destroyed part
of the Urakame valley. In parallel north and south lines? here the Urakame
river, Mitsubishi plants on both sides, the railroad line and the main
road from town. For two miles stretches a line of congested steel and some
concrete factories with the residential district "across the tracks.
The atomic bomb landed between and totally destroyed both with half (illegible)
living persons in them. The known dead-number 20,000 police tell me they
estimate about 4,000 remain to be found.
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- The reason the deaths were so high -- the wounded being
about twice as many according to Japanese official figures -- was twofold:
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- 1. Mitsubishi air raid shelters were totally inadequate
and the civilian shelters remote and limited.
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- 2. That the Japanese air warning system was a total failure.
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- I inspected half a dozen crude short tunnels in the
rock wall valley which the Mitsubishi Co., considered shelters. I also
picked my way through the tangled iron girders and curling roofs of the
main factories to see concrete shelters four inches thick but totally inadequate
in number. Only a grey concrete building topped by a siren, where the clerical
staff had worked had reasonable cellar shelters, but nothing resembling
the previous had been made.
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- A general alert had been sounded at seven in the morning,
four hours before two B-29's appeared, but it was ignored by the workmen
and most of the population. The police insist that the air raid warning
was sounded two minutes before the bomb fell, but most people say they
heard none.
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- As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories,
the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar
weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the
ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins
where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer
nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation.
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- Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that
the bomb is different than any other, except in a broader extent flash
and a more powerful knock-out.
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- All around the Mitsubishi plant are ruins which one would
gladly have spared. The writer spent nearly an hour in 15 deserted buildings
in the Nagasaki Medical Institute hospital which (illegible).
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- Nothing but rats live in the debris choked halls. On
the opposite side of the valley and the Urakame river is a three story
concrete American mission college called Chin Jei, nearly totally destroyed.
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- Japanese authorities point out that the home area flattened
by American bombs was traditionally the place of Catholic and Christian
Japanese.
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- But sparing these and sparing the allied prison camp,
which the Japanese placed next to an armor plate factory would have meant
sparing Mitsubishi's ship parts plant with 1,016 employees who were mostly
Allied. It would have spared a Mounting factory connecting with 1,750 employees.
It would have spared three steel foundries on both sides of the Urakame,
using ordinarily 3,400 but that day 2,500. And besides sparing many sub-contracting
plants now flattened it would have meant leaving untouched the Mitsubishi
torpedo and ammunition plant employing 7,500 and which was nearest where
the bomb up.
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- All these latter plants today are hammered flat. But
no saboteur creeping among the war plants of death could have placed the
atomic bomb by hand more scrupulously given Japan's inertia about common
defense.
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- NAGASAKI, Saturday, Sept.8 (odn) -- In swaybacked or
flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the
atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against
human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki.
Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from
the blast's center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in
the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that
the liberated atom spares nothing in the way. The human beings whom it
has happened to spare sit on (illegible) One tiny family board their platforms
in Nagasaki's two largest (illegible) hospitals, their shoulders, arms
and faces are strapped in bandages.
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- Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to
reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official
guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to knew: "What do
you think?"
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- What this question means is: do you intend saying that
America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That
is what we want you to write.
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- Several children, some burned and others unburned but
with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday
Japanese photographers took many pictures with them. About one in five
is heavily bandaged, but none of showing signs of pain.
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- Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan
softly. One woman caring for her husband, shows eyes dim with tears. It
is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to
see if you are moved.
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- Visiting many litters, talking lengthily with two general
physicians and one X-ray specialist, gains you a large amount of information
and opinion on the victims. Statistics are variable and few records are
kept. But it is ascertained that this chief municipal hospital had about
750 atomic patients until this week and lost by death approximately 360.
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- About 70 percent of the deaths have been from plain burns.
The Japanese say that anyone caught outdoors in a mile by half-mile area
was burned to death. But this is known to be untrue because most of the
allied prisoners burned in the plant escaped and only about one-fourth
were burned. Yet it is undoubtedly true that many at 11:02 o'clock on this
morning of Aug. 9 were caught in debris by casual fires which kindled and
caught during the next half hour.
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- But most of the patients who were gravely burned have
now passed away and those on hand are rapidly curing. Those not curing
are people whose unhappy lot provides the mystery aura around the atomic
bomb's effects. They are victims of what Lt. Jakob Vink, Dutch medical
officer and now allied commandant of prison camp 14 at the mouth of Nagasaki
harbor calls "disease." Vink himself was in the allied prison
kitchen abutting the Mitsubishi armor plate department when the ceiling
fell in but he escaped this mysterious "disease X" which some
allied prisoners and many Japanese civilians got.
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- Vink points out a woman on a yellow mat in hospital,
who according to hospital doctors Hikodero (sic) Koga and Uraaji (sic)
Hayashida have just been brought in. She fled the atomic area but returned
to live. She was well for three weeks expect a small burn on the heel.
Now she lies moaning with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw
and unable to utter clear words.
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- Her exposed legs and arms are speckled with tiny red
spots in patches.
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- Near her lies a 15-year-old fattish girl who has the
same blotchy red pinpoints and nose clotted with blood. A little farther
on is a window lying down with four children, from one to about 8, around
her. The two smallest children have lost some hair. Though none of these
people has either a barn or a broken limb, they are presumed victims of
the atomic bomb.
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- Dr. Uraji Hayashida shakes his head somberly and says
that he believes there must be something to the American radio report about
the ground around the Mitsubishi plant being poisoned. But his next statement
knocks out the props from under this theory because it develops that the
widow's family has been absent from the wrecked area ever since the blast
yet shows symptoms common with those who returned.
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- According to Japanese doctors, patients with these late
developing symptoms are dying now a month after the bombs fall, at the
rate of about 10 daily. The three doctors calmly stated that the disease
has them nonplussed and that they are giving no treatment whatever but
rest. Radio rumors from America received the same consideration with the
symptoms under their noses. They are licked for cure and do not seem very
worried about it.
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- NAGASAKI, Sept.8 (cdn) -- More pieces to the broken mosaic
of history are supplied by prisoners in the liberated, but still unrelieved
camps on Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island.
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- While waiting for Gen. Walter Krueger's army to arrive,
the inmates are receiving humble bows and salutes from the Japanese officers
who formerly ruled them with an iron red.
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- By exchanging visits with prisoners from other parts
of Kyushu they are able to find out what happened in the blacked out periods
of the past.
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- Camp No. 14 which was inside Mitsubishi war factory area
until the atomic bomb fell there is now moved inside the eastern mouth
of the Nagasaki harbor. Here you can meet Fireman Edward Matthews of Everett,
Washington and the American destroyer Pope.
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- He fills in the unknown story of how the Pope fought
trying to take the cruiser Houston through the Sunda straits in the face
of a Japanese task force of "eight cruisers and endless destroyers.
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- "We contacted the Japs at seven in the morning.
They opened fire at 8:30 a.m. We held out until 2 p.m., when a Jap spotter
plane dropped a bomb near out stern and watched us go down. A Jap destroyer
saw us sink. It was a perfectly clear day. They let us stay in the water
- 154 men with one 24 man whaleboat and one life raft - for three days.
We were about crazy when they picked us up and took us to Macassar."
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- From Camp No. 3 at Tabata near Mojie in northern Kyushu
come three ex-prisoners who have found the lure of the open roads irresistible
after three years confinement and have come to Nagasaki in order to view
the results of the atomic bomb. Charles Gellings of North East, Md., says,
"The Houston was caught on the eastern side or Java side of Sunda.
It was in the straits near Bantan Bay. Three hundred and forty-eight were
saved, but they were all scattered."
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- Chicago born Miles Mahnke, Plane, Ill., who looks all
right, though his original 215 pounds dropped to 160, says, "I was,
in the death march at Bataan. Guess you know what that was."
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- Here is Albert Rupp of the submarine Grenadier, who lives
at 920 Belmont av., Philadelphia, "We were chasing two Nip cargo boats
450 miles off Penang. A spotter plane dropped a bomb on us hitting the
maneuvering room. We lay on the bottom, but the next time came up we were
bombed again. We finally had to scuttle the sub. Thirty-nine men of forty-two
were saved."
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- Also from the submarine is William Cunningham, 4225 Webster
av. Bronx N.Y., who started with Rupp on his tour of southern Japan.
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- Another party of four vagabond prisoners from camps whose
Japanese commanders and guards have simply disappeared, are Albert Johnson,
Geneva, Ohio; Hershel Langston, Van Buren, Kans., Morris Kellogg, Mule
Shoe, Tex., all crew members of the oil tanker Connecticut, now touring
Japan with a carefree marine from North China Guard at Peking, Walter Allan,
Waxahachie, Tex.
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- The three members from the oil tanker would like a word
with the Captain of the German raider who took them prisoner. The captain
told them that "in the last war you Americans confined Germans in
Japan; this war we Germans are going to take you Americans to Japan and
see how you like a taste of the same medicine."
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- Kyushu has about 10,000 prisoners, or about one-third
the total is all Japan, mixed in the completely disordered fashion, the
Japanese used and without any records.
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- At Camp No.2, by the entrance to Nagasaki Bay are 68
survivors of the British Cruiser Exeter which sank in the Java Sea battle
while trying to expel the Japanese task force. Eight inch shells penetrated
her waterline.
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- Five of the supposed total of nine survivors from the
British destroyer the Stronghold, sunk near the Sunda straits at the same
time are also here.
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- There are also 14 Britons of an approximate 100 from
the destroyer Encounter lost at the same time, besides 62 R.A.F. mostly
from Java and Singapore.
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- Among 324 Dutch cruisers the Java and De Ruyter were
sunk at 2300 the night of Feb. 27, 1942 by torpedo attacks which the Japs
boasted were staged not by destroyers or submarines, but cruisers.
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- There is also a Dutch officer from the Destroyer Koortenaer,
torpedoed by night in the Java Sea battle.
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- Husky Cpl. Raymond Woest, Fredericksburg, Tex., told
how remembers of the 131st Field Artillery poured 75 caliber shells into
the Japs for six hours outside Soerabaya before Java fell, killing an estimated
700.
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- To correspondents eager questions about this outfit which
had been into action in Java, Wuest said that 450 members (illegible) and
were now scattered in the Far East. (illegible) Nagasaki, whereof most
were moved to Camp No. 9 (at least one further sentence follows, but it
is illegible.)
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- NAGASAKI, Sept.9 (cdn) -- The atomic bomb's peculiar
"disease," uncured because it is untreated and untreated because
it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here.
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- Men, woman and children with no outward marks of injury
are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or
four weeks thinking they have escaped.
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- The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly
confessed in talking to the writer - the first Allied observer to Nagasaki
since the surrender - that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their
patients, though their skin is whole, are all passing away under their
eyes.
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- Kyushu's leading X-ray specialist, who arrived today
from the island's chief city Fukuoka, elderly Dr. Yosisada Nakashima, told
the writer that he is convinced that these people are simply suffering
from the atomic bomb's beta Gamma, or the neutron ray is taking effect.
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- "All the symptoms are similar," said the Japanese
doctor. "You have a reduction in white corpuscles, constriction in
the throat, vomiting, diarrhea and small hemorrhages just below the skin.
All of these things happen when an overdose of Roentgen rays is given.
Bombed children's hair falls out. That is natural because these rays are
used often to make hair fall artificially and sometimes takes several days
before the hair becomes loose."
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- Nakashima differed with general physicians who have asked
the regiment to close off a bombed area claiming that returned refugees
are infected from the ground by lethal rays.
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- "I believe that any after effect out there is negligible.
I mean to make tests soon with an electrometer," said the specialist.
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- A suggestion by Dutch doctor Lt. Jakob Vink, taken prisoner
and now commander of the allied prison camp here, that the drug (illegible)
which increased white corpuscles be tried brought the answer from Nakashima
that it would be "useless, because the grave (illegible).
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- At emergency hospital No. 2, commanding officer young
Lt. Col. Yoshitaka Sasaki, with three rows of campaign ribbons on his breast,
stated that 200 patients died of 343 admitted and that the expects about
50 more deaths.
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- Most severe ordinary burns resulted in the patients (sic)
deaths within a week after the bomb fell. But this hospital began taking
patients only from one to two weeks afterward. It is therefore almost exclusively
"disease" cases and the deaths are mostly therefrom.
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- Nakashima divides the deaths outside simple burns and
fractures into two classes on the basis of symptoms observed in the post
mortem autopsies.
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- The first class accounts for roughly 60 percent of the
deaths, the second for 40 percent.
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- Among exterior symptoms in the first class are, falling
hair from the head, armpits and public zones, spotty local skin hemorrhages
looking like measles all over the body, lip sores, diarrhea but without
blood discharge, swelling in the throat (illegible) of the epiglottis and
retropharynx and a descent in number of red and white corpuscles.
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- Red corpuscles fall from a normal 5,000,000 to one-half,
or one-third while the white's almost disappear, dropping from 7,000 or
8,000 to 300 to 500.
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- Fever rises to 104 and stays there without fluctuating.
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- Interior symptoms of the first class revealed in the
postmortems seems to show the intestines choked with blood which Nakashima
thinks occurs a few hours before death.
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- The stomach is also blood choked, also mesenterium. Blood
spots appear in the bone narrow and bus-arachnoydeal, oval blood (illegible)
on the brain which, however, is not affected. Going up part of the intestines
have a little blood, but the congestion is mainly in (illegible) down passages.
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- Nakashima considers that it is possible that the atomic
bomb's rare rays may cause deaths in the first class, as with delayed X-ray
burns. But second class has him totally baffled. These patients begin with
slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from
simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Unfevered
patients with as much as one-third of the skin area burned have been known
to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, healing of burns
suddenly halts and they get worse. They come to resemble septic ulcers.
Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray
burns victims.
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- Up to five days from the torn to the worse, they die.
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- Their bloodstream has not thinned as in first class and
their organs after death are found in a normal condition of health. But
they are dead - dead of atomic bomb - and nobody knows why.
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- Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive Sept. 11 to study
the Nagasaki bombsite. Japanese hope that they will bring a solution for
Disease X.
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- Copyright (c) 2005 by Anthony Weller.
- All rights reserved.
- Published with permission of Anthony Weller, Gloucester,
Massachusetts through Dunow & Carlson Literary Agency, New York via
Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.
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- http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/specials/0506/0617weller.html
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