JAPAN: Ordeal by Pen

Only last week did news get out about what happened to three British seamen who, one day early in October, took a taxi ride in Keelung, on the Japanese island of Formosa. At the end of the ride, the driver had his three passengers jailed on the charge of not paying their fare. When they resolutely denied the charge, four Japanese policemen held them down in turn while Japanese detectives beat each man in the face. Under this treatment two of the three British tars agreed to sign a declaration that they were guilty. The third, although his jaw was broken, still refused to sign. While police again held him down, a Japanese detective jabbed the point of a fountain pen deeply under the sailor’s nails and vigorously worked the fountain pen lever, shooting ink into the wounds until the sweating prisoner agreed to take the pen, sign a confession.

As this episode was reaching its climax, into the Keelung police station marched Lieut. T. A. Pack-Beresford of the British flotilla leader Bruce, to demand the seamen’s release. “I have obtained unquestionable proof,” he said, “that these sailors paid their taxi fare.” Snarled one of the Japanese police officers at Lieut. Pack-Beresford: “You say you’re a British officer. We say you’re nothing but a drunken sot. Get out of here!”

When news of this reached Vice Admiral Sir Charles James Colebrooke Little, Commander-in-Chief of the China Squadron at Shanghai, he was so incensed that he postponed a scheduled trip to Japan. In London, news of the Japanese provocation at Keelung was kept secret long after the facts were known at the British Admiralty, and not a single Japanese newsorgan carried so much as a line on the Keelung ordeal by pen.