Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/171

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THE MONUMENT
161

single family that included members of the union in Osawa which had not suffered arrests. An aged paralytic, all of whose relatives had been taken away, committed suicide. There were three other suicides, all under the influence of terror. Some threw themselves into the well.

Such was the state of affairs just before the fifteenth of March.

A group of peasants from Yotani and Simajzi, just released, was again seized on March 15th, in their sleep, thrown into an automobile, taken to Moriyama, Kusanu and Otsu and kept there some two months. Eleven from Yotani—including Miesima, Ozava and Kurose—were sent up for trial.

The Peasant Union was continually harried by the police. Any prominent member of a local union was thrown into prison directly after being sent up for trial. Its leaders arrested, the fighting front fell to pieces throughout the province.

Spring had not come yet.

In the beginning of April the Yotani Health-Resort Company put a huge advertisement in all the papers.

The seven hotels were full of guests by the beginning of the summer. Exalted old gentlemen with polished skulls emerged from their doors in the evenings, accompanied by two or three young women apiece. Geishas with Marumage coiffures clung to the arms of the fat men. Young girls, looking like tortoises in European dress, walked hand-in-hand beside their worthy mammas, going for excursions into the hills. When the guests met