Swords; Seducers; Spies

A leering Tokyo scanned with rare delight last week a juicy story about French missionaries. Seemingly with full Government approval, closely censored news-organs shrieked details so lurid as to be ludicrous. Lecherous French missionaries, it appeared, have been seducing Japanese girls. The jealousy of two such wenches with respect to their priest caused one of them to unmask him to the police. An entire priestly gang has been making "minute topographic surveys of the Japanese coast with tiny cameras," hiding the films in French missionary churches. To protect themselves against the just wrath of the local Japanese populace, certain French fathers go about "guarded with drawn swords by Japanese ex-soldiers whom they have converted to Catholicism!"

Explanation: last week the Imperial Government needed to distract public opinion from the fact that the French Embassy was forcing it to eat crow. Irate France demanded and received apologies for baseless charges recently circulated that handsome French Assistant Naval Attache Tessier Ducros has proved irresistible to 30 ladies, some of the highest Japanese nobility and gentry, others waitresses, professors' wives. In return for his gallant favors they were supposed to have slipped him slews of State secrets.

So acute is Japanese spy mania today, so galling are restrictions and indignities imposed upon tourists, that Japanese tourist agencies recently petitioned the Ministry of Interior for relief. The best they could get was this significant order to Japanese detectives* and police: "It is intimated that in future it will not be necessary to look upon all foreigners traveling in Japan as spies."

*So excessive is the number of Government plain-clothes snoopers that their cost has been solemnly justified on the ground that it amounts to a dole, helps to keep down unemployment.

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