It was accompanied by an unusual gift, laboriously made over an eight-month period: an embroidered portrait of MacArthur, to which all 120,000 petitioners had each contributed a stitch. The inspiration for this striking present lay in one of the more intimate symbolic acts of the war years—the practice of sending soldiers cloth stomach warmers sewn with a thousand stitches, each by a different person. Both making and wearing the sennin-bari haramaki (“thousand-stitch belly bands”) were affirmations of the closeness between men fighting abroad and their communities, especially their womenfolk,
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