Foreign News: Spies, Spies & Spies

“AMERICANS ARE SPYING IN JAPAN!” splashed out Tokyo’s chauvinistic Kokumin Shimbun last week, exposed the horrid fact that pictures of Japanese business buildings in Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe have recently been taken by branch officials of Manhattan’s far flung National City Bank.

Soon several rich Japanese withdrew their deposits from National City’s Osaka branch, mobs milled around its doors. branch officials received threatening letters and placards proclaimed: “Patriotic Japanese employes of this spying Ameri can bank must walk out in a body!” The new U. S. Ambassador to Japan is alert, athletic, slightly deaf Josef Clark Grew, kinsman of John Pierpont Morgan, whose last post was Turkey. Mr. Grew stood for no nonsense in Tokyo. Laconically he cabled to the State Department : “The recent affair of the Osaka branch of the National City Bank of New York which is subjected to a charge of photo graphic espionage has assumed proportions which threaten to cause serious injury to the bank’s prestige and business, if not to its personnel and property. “Grew therefore called on the Minister of Foreign Affairs this afternoon and laid the matter before him asking that full investigation be made and an official statement issued which would absolve the bank from all blame and thus tend to rectify the harm already done. Grew also asked that steps be taken to stop the press campaign against the bank. “Count Uchida replied that an investigation is already under way. …” To incredulous Japanese, National City’s Tokyo Branch Manager Daniel Waugh kept explaining: “We took the pictures for advertising purposes! National City wants to advertise the recent industrial developments in Tokyo. Osaka and Kobe. Don’t you understand? Such advertising will be for the good of Japan!” “Overzealous Persons.” Understanding not one whit, the semi-official Osaka radio station JOBK next day joined Japanese newspapers in spreading charges that National City’s photographs were taken for the use of U. S. bombers, stories that “secret American air bases are being planted on the Aleutian Islands,” (some 2,000 miles from Japan), assertions that “mysterious American women are spying in Japan” and rehashes of the undeniable fact that the entire U. S. fleet is maneuvering in the Pacific Ocean. “Personally, I think the charges are absurd,” barked War Minister Sadoo Araki in his office. “They merely reflect the nervousness of some overzealous persons, frightened at imaginary dangers.” Such overzealous persons included the entire Japanese gendarmery, directly subordinate to tut-tutting Lieut.-General Araki. Japanese reporters, calling at offices of the gendarmery, had their worst fears confirmed, rushed off to concoct new American Spy Extras. Spies’ Report To Tokyo last week Japanese spies, ever industrious but often stupid, carried what they said was a copy of the League of Nation’s secret Report on Manchuria, drafted at a cost of more than $400,000 by dyspeptic Lord Lytton’s Commission (TIME, Sept. 5). Tokyo papers carried a 200-word summary of the 400-page report—a summary surprisingly favorable to Japan. Next day Japan’s Foreign Office asked the League to delay publication of the Lytton Report (scheduled to appear this week), for at least another six weeks. Why? The Foreign Office refused to explain. To most Chinese and many an Occidental it seemed possible that Japan was asking the League to hold back the true text while she spread around the Orient a distorted version. Sailing from Shanghai last week, close-lipped Lord Lytton said of his Commission “Defunctns est. It is dead. From now on the League of Nations is sole custodian of our report.” Mrs. McCoy & Spy— Privately members of the League Commission are telling friends about fun they constantly had with Japanese spies, even in China. The story goes that in Peiping Mrs. Frances Judson McCoy, wife of the U. S. member, General Frank Ross McCoy, entered her hotel bedroom, caught a servant red handed in the act of “dusting.” “Splendid!” cried Mrs. McCoy. “The room is dirty isn’t it? I am so glad you are dusting! Now get a mop and mop the floor.” For two long hours the Japanese spy scrubbed, kept up the pretense that he was a Chinese “boy” (servant). “Now that everything is clean,” brightly observed Mrs. McCoy, “I want you to move all the furniture. Bring that bed here. Move that bureau over there. And then you might scrub the ceiling.” Sweating and grunting the spy obeyed until it was time for Mrs. McCoy to dress for dinner. “You can go now,” she sweetly told him. “Thank you so much, Captain Kitakawa.”