Spy Nonsense

Progress of Japan's spy neurosis last week:

P: Arrested in Kobe was Mark A. Pierce, a substantial citizen of Los Angeles and onetime police commissioner, on a holiday in Japan. As his tourist ship was sailing through the Inland Sea, a detective had seen him taking photographs, which when developed showed a passing warship. He was severely questioned ten hours a day for eleven days, taken to a hotel at night. Japanese police thought they had hit on something real when they found in Pierce's baggage a scroll showing that Mark Pierce is entitled to be called "Colonel" in the State of Kentucky. Other suspicious facts: he was interested in yachting and photography, was an undertaker. Inasmuch as Mr. Pierce had once opposed anti-Japanese bills as a member of the California legislature and had come to Japan on the rosy invitation of a mass of Japanese tourist literature, he felt distinctly put upon. When the police released him, covering themselves by levying an $8.50 fine for taking photographs in a fortified zone, Mark Pierce made a sizzling speech to the Tokyo Rotary Club and said he was getting out of Japan.

P: Arrested at Kagoshima and held overnight was an Australian woman named Gertrude Edward Snyder, who had made a practice of wandering off the beaten tourist track in the Japanese back country.

P: Released in Formosa were three adventurers arrested last fortnight. William Shinn Gates, 28, Annapolis graduate who was retired from the U. S. Navy for his health, wanted to look for treasure and see whether the women of the Babuyan Islands really outnumbered the men 20 to 1. With a German named Wrede and a Russian named Roubin, he was arrested at Taito, Formosa, because their ketch The Flying Dutchman was blown ashore suspiciously near two Japanese war boats in the Taito harbor. This looked to the Japanese like a real threat but it soon fell apart and the three were fined and released.

P: Japan's military jitters last week passed into the dizzy realm of pure nonsense when Tokyo police pounced on a publisher of wood block prints and seized 200 prints of a famed view of Xaruto Strait, done nearly 100 years ago by famed Hiroshige (1797-1858). The print shows a rocky shore line, drawn with the master's delicate and pointed simplicity. Scores of copies of it have long hung on U. S. walls. Xaruto Strait, however, is now a fortified zone. Last week the Tokyo police, addled by suspicion, forbade further reproduction and sale of Hiroshige's lovely picture.

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