The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

On the morning of July 5th 1949, Shimoyama Sadanori, the President of Japanese National Railroads, asks his chauffeur to take him to the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Early next morning, the driver of a train passing Kita Senju, northern Tokyo, notices something alongside the tracks. The body of Shimoyama. By 1949, in the face of increasing labour unrest, a resurgent Japanese Communist Party, and uinfavourable events in China and the Soviet Union, the American Occupation was in ‘reverse course’. No organisation represented the tension and turmoil within Occupied Japan more than the Japanese National Railroads. Under Occupation reforms, JNR had become a public corporation and the nation’s largest employer. Shimoyama, as President, was then charged by the Occupation authorities with curbing power and dismissing 100,000 workers over that summer.