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JAPAN: Beauteous Traitress

2 minute read
TIME

Tokyo was treated last week to some-thing as exciting as though Paris had learned during the World War that Sarah Bernhardt, Cecile Sorel or Mistinguett had eloped to Germany with a French admirer of Kaiser Wilhelm. A topflight Japanese stage & screen star is Miss Yoshiki Okada, billed soon to appear in a leading Tokyo theatre. For a time she was the Viscountess Takeuchi, recently was said to have taken as her lover a Japanese Communist writer, Ryokichi Sugimoto. Last week this pair were reported out sleighing on the snow-covered island of Sakhalin, half Japanese, half Soviet. Suddenly the Japanese sleigh driver found himself being nudged in the ribs by Comrade Sugimoto with a pistol. The driver halted, watched, terrified and helpless, while the actress and her Red put on skis, started down a steep slope in the direction of the Soviet frontier and disappeared in gathering darkness. Japanese frontier patrols, summoned by the driver, found no trace of the ski-elopers, said they had apparently made for a Soviet frontier post about a mile from the spot where they started their slide.

Next day friends of Miss Okada mourned her as a traitress to Japan, morally dead. The Japanese Government ordered its consul at Alexandrovsk, Russian Sakhalin, to “demand full information.” But over their beer in Tokyo hard-to-convince U. S. journalists, suspicious of a publicity hoax, agreed that so far as they knew the lover of Miss Okada had been not Sugimoto but a mildly radical Japanese theatrical producer, Yoshimasa Yoshida. Sure enough, part of their suspicion was confirmed. Japanese dispatches from Sakhalin declared that the lover in the case was indeed Yoshida but still insisted that he and Miss Okada had eloped to the Reds. Final confirmation came when Soviet officials at Alexandrovsk announced they had clapped Actress Okada and Producer Yoshida into a small jail near the frontier. In Tokyo detectives grilled stage colleagues of the pair, learned they had participated at the Soviet Embassy in amateur theatricals.

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