Our Man In Tokyo by Steve Kemper

Author:Steve Kemper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

31

The Matsuoka Hurricane

IN JANUARY 1940 James R. Young, an American correspondent living in Japan, left Tokyo to report on the war in China. When he returned he gave a talk at the American Club, where hidden Dictaphones recorded conversations and at least two waiters worked for the Kempeitai, charting who sat with whom. A few days later Young was arrested and charged under the army’s criminal code with spreading false and slanderous rumors, more typically called facts.

Young’s first call was to Grew. The ambassador’s authority didn’t extend into Japanese law, but he made clear his keen interest in the case by sending Young his trademark fur coat to wear in the unheated jail. Grew was over six feet tall and Young was not, so Young could turn up the collar and stay cozy from forehead to ankles. More important, the coat was “a diplomatic formula of secret protection,” wrote Young, because all the policemen knew it was Grew’s. That may be why they slit the lining to look for hidden messages. During his two months in jail Young never took the coat off, and he wore it throughout his trial. His defense was that he had written the truth, which the judge dismissed as immaterial. Young was convicted but given a suspended sentence, perhaps partly thanks to Grew’s coat.

Young’s arrest sent a chill through the foreign reporters in Tokyo, but chill turned to fear after the Konoye cabinet took over in July. A spigot opened wide, spewing xenophobia and hatred of the Western media. On July 27 the Tokyo police arrested a British correspondent for Reuters named James Cox. After two days in police custody he jumped out a fourth-story window—a suicidal leap, according to the police. His wife and colleagues scoffed at that. His arms and legs had been repeatedly punctured by hypodermic needles. Grew suspected he had thrown himself out the window, or been thrown out, after days of torture. Cox was posthumously charged with eight counts of espionage for possessing, though not publishing, common military information, such as troop strength in China and Manchuria.

Censorship of the press took many forms. By 1940 most Japanese newspapers were servants of the government. To make the press easier to manage, the government had choked off the supply of newsprint, which it controlled. Between 1937 and 1939, hundreds of papers shut down. By 1940 most prefectures had only one paper, with dwindling pages. The number of magazines and journals plummeted as well. The government further chilled free expression by arresting reporters and suspending permits to publish.

In a separate category were the few independent English-language periodicals in Japan, and the correspondents for American and British media, but the Japanese government tightened its control of them as well. Into the mid-1930s the correspondents could send their stories home via international telephone, but as events in China and Japan got uglier, the government censors who monitored the phone calls began refusing to put them through. When the correspondents asked the government to investigate censorship

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