Reception at Uraga

On a summer day in 1853, the port of Uraga was decked in holiday style. Brightly painted, flag-festooned screens lined the shore of lower Tokyo Bay. Soldiers paraded in burnished armor. Elegant emissaries of the Mikado in exquisite brocades, and velvets turned out to greet Commodore Matthew Perry as he debarked from the U.S. man-o'-war Susquehanna.

Last week a drab and depressed Uraga had a harbor reception of a different kind. The arriving travelers were 336 Japanese men, women & children--diplomats, businessmen and newspapermen returning home with their families from foreign posts. From the decks of the rusty old Tsukushi Mam, they gazed glumly at the panorama of defeat. On the pier was a delegation of U.S. Eighth Army personnel. As the sullen repatriates debarked, they were hustled to the customs shed. There, teams of doctors, officers and G.I.s (for the men) and nurses, WACs and female Nisei (for the women) stripped them, ripped their clothing open at the seams, paraded them before fluoroscopes.

The search nipped the repatriates' careful plans to smuggle home valuables in addition to funds which they had been ordered to turn over to Allied authorities when Japan surrendered. In the knee patches of a child's ski suit, inspectors found a wad of large-denomination U.S. bills. A woman's sewing kit concealed three whopping diamonds. A three-year-old's belt bulged with 21 wristwatches. Shoe heels and toothpaste tubes disgorged a torrent of foreign currency and jewelry.

After searching the passengers and their 3,000 pieces of baggage, officials guessed the total haul would amount to $5,000,000.

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