Japanese “Fed Up With American Bomb Tests”

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27370, 8 June 1954, Page 14

Japanese “Fed Up With American Bomb Tests”

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, June 7. Japanese ships trading to New Zealand were returning to their home ports radio-active after sailing through the Western Pacific, said Mr Eric S. Bell, a New Zealand teacher, who has spent the last 32 years in Japan, when he arrived at Aucklnad this morning. Radioactive ships were reaching Japan daily, and the country was “fed up” with American bomb tests.

Mr Bell arrived in the Japanese ship Chowa Maru, which, he said, was radioactive when she returned to Japan from her last voyage to New Zealand. “The ships have to be laid up for weeks till they are free of radioactivity before they put to sea again,” Mr Bell said. “The Chowa Maru was two weeks in dock after her last trip to New Zealand?’

Mr Bell said it was being suggested by many influential Japanese that the Americans timed their atom and hydrogen bomb tests to coincide with the

westerly movement of the Pacific trade winds.

“The trade winds blow towards Japan between Christmas and this time of the year, and then blow towards the United States’ coast. They say that as soon as the winds turn towards America, the bomb tests finish,” he said.

Travelling with Mr Bell on a three months’ holiday in New Zealand is one of his students, 20-year-old Bobby Kato, who confirmed what Mi* Bell said about radioactivity, “Almost every ship returning from Australia recently has been radioactive,” he said. “The Government has now ordered all ships to make a 3000mile detour round the danger area on their way to the Philippines and Australia.”

A Christchurch man, Mr Bell went to Japan 32 years ago to teach English. He said he could not think of resettling in New Zealand, in spite of the Way he was treated in Japan during the war.

“I came back to New Zealand after my first year* in Japan, but got very homesick and went back again,” he said.

After university teaching in Tokyo Mr Bell was thrown into prison as a spy after Pearl Harbour. “I hadn’t done anything, but they kept me there for a year,” he said. “I could scarcely walk when I came out. My daily ration was two slices of dried bread, morning and night, and one small pot of Japanese tea. "After a year of this, I was moved to an internment camp up in the mountains. The rations were not better, but otherwise the treatment wasn’t bad.

“I was really kept alive by the young Japanese I used to teach. They brought me food regularly when they were almost starving themselves, “There was one student who tramped up into the mountains every week with something for me to eat. They were marvellous.”

Mr Bell said he had no thought of leaving Japan after the war. He worked for three years with an American intelligence unit, but left that post “because I’ve always been a teacher.”

Now he is teaching in a Tokyo high school. He has brought Mr Kato with him “on a goodwill visit.” They are going to Christchurch to stay with Mr Bell’s sister, Mrs Arthur Minson, of 73 Te Awa Kura terrace, St. Andrew’s