JAPAN’S FEAR OF SPIES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3799, 24 August 1936, Page 7

JAPAN’S FEAR OF SPIES

WATCHFULNESS OF POLICE. The Japanese police authorities have always had jumpy nerves in the matter of supposed foreign espionage activities, says a writer in the London Observer. The taking of photographs of even the most innocent objects in the numerous “fortified zones” of the Island Empire has been especially frowned on. The unwary tourist who takes a snapshot of a picturesque sampan or of a large ocean liner in one of Japan’s port is likely to find himself under detention and exposed to severe cross-examination by officials.

An American, a former Los Angeles chief of police, with a record of friendly service to Japanese residents of California, was detained for over a week by the Kobe police on account of a few'snapshots which he took on entering the port. He had planned to attend a Rotary convention in Kioto; when he finally arrived in Tokio and called at the Rotary Club his speech was very different from the message of international goodwill which he had originally intended to deliver.

This police watchfulness has been greatly intensified since the outbreak of February 26. While martial law regulations have been formally in force only in Tokio, the authorities throughout the country have reflected the tension in the capital by keeping foreigners under closer observation. One of the first victims of this enhanced vigilance was an English writer, Mr. Gerald Samson, who had spent over a year in Japan, collecting material for a book, which he proposed to call “Japan Without Prejudice.’’ Mr. Samson was arrested on the day after the “incident,” held incommunicado for some time, and finally deported. It was intimated that he had been .“spreading false rumours” and “agitating against the martial law regulation,” and some of the vernacular newspapers did not hesitate, without any visible proof, to accuse him of espionage.

More recently two Japanese, Minora Yokota and K. Oyama, were arrested because they had allegedly taken photographs of power sub-stations and transmission lines in Saitama prefecture, near Tokio, supposedly for the benefit of a foreign consulate. Another Japanese, Ryuji Suzuki, was detained by the police of Tsurumi, a town between Tokio and Yokohama, charged with surveying the Asano Dockyard and the Nippon Automobile Company. Further agitation was aroused by the alleged action of an unnamed foreign diplomat in communicating an article “True Facts of the Tokio Incident as Seen from the Beginning, by a Chinese Journalist,” to “The China Weekly Review.” This is a Shanghai publication, edited by an American, many copies of which are confiscated in the mails by the Japanese censorship authorities because of their outspoken criticism of Japan. The “Asahi,” one of the leading Tokio newspapers, recently reported that the Home Office was endeavouring to obtain an additional appropriation of a million yen (about £60,000) for the purpose of tracking down spies, and it was proposed to assign a thousand officers to the foreign sections of the Tokio and provincial police forces.