Hunger in the North

Outside the little shack the snow was packed in deep drifts. Beyond its white expanse lay the forbidding waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, already thick with pack ice drifting down from Siberia. Inside, protected from the cold by walls papered with pages from popular Japanese magazines, barefoot Minoru Goto shuffled toward the iron stove with another piece of kindling and awaited the return of her children from school. "The first thing they'll say is, 'I'm hungry,' " she sighed, "but even if they ask, we don't have anything for them these days." For all the other 400 families in the little village of Kaitaku, it was the same story.

Minoru and her husband, a onetime airplane mechanic, had been faced with a choice at war's end: to return to the hopelessness of the burned-out ruins of Tokyo or to start a new life as pioneers on the far northern island of Hokkaido. Government posters showed Hokkaido's inviting green landscapes, its fat dairy herds, its red brick silos and its snug, warm farmhouses. Along with some 190,000 other Japanese families, the Gotos seized the opportunity.

Unlike the Posters. Life in Hokkaido, the northernmost and second largest island in the Japanese chain, turned out not to be like the posters. In winter the farms of the homesteaders lay under snow that heaped in drifts up to 6 ft. high. In summer the island's rocky, clay-filled soil was stubbornly unproductive. Hokkaido crop yields were only half of those harvested elsewhere in the nation.

This fall Hokkaido's farmers suffered their worst crop failure in 42 years. Hokkaido's fishermen were doing just as badly: harried by Russian gunboats from the Kurile and Sakhalin islands, they were desperately forced to overfish their own meager waters.

Girls for Sale. In the midst of a Cadillac-plated prosperity in Tokyo, only the efforts of a group of charities ranging from the United Nations International Children's Fund and Catholic and Protestant groups to Japan's own Association of Pinball Machine Manufacturers have been able to stave off actual starvation in Hokkaido. Even though the U.S. Air Force last week flew in three planeloads of food. Hokkaido's farmers face both hunger and bankruptcy. "We've sold even the gold from our teeth," one farmer told TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast. "The only thing we've left to sell is our daughter." It was not a joke. Many a farm family, in desperate need, has returned to the old but recently outlawed custom of selling off a daughter to some enterprising brothel keeper in exchange for ready cash. So far this year, the Hokkaido prefectural police headquarters reported, 1,454 girls have been sold to restaurants, brothels and geisha houses, and 1,040 persons had been charged with brokerage in girls. Some teenagers have been sold for $15; in rare instances, more attractive girls have gone for as high as $550.

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