"797,423"

An old vaudeville gag told of a conceited counterfeiter who came to grief because he could not resist putting his own picture in place of George Washington's. Osaka's aging, ailing Counterfeiter Kanji Ikeda and his wife Yoshino were not vain, but they did arrange the serial numbers on their fake bills to read as messages to the son whose death in the war had turned their life to misery and despair. One of the Arabic numbers--797,423--read aloud in Japanese, meant: "Don't cry, honorable elder son."

In Japan, where the largest note in circulation is 100 yen (worth approximately 50-c-), counterfeiting is a poor business at best, and the Ikedas were not even good counterfeiters.

Living in a tiny, corrugated iron shack with no blankets and little food, the pair laboriously painted copies of 100-yen and 10-yen notes by hand. Kanji, a onetime mechanical draftsman, sold them apologetically at a 10% discount, explaining that the ink had been blurred in a faulty printing press. In ten months, the total take was less than $50.

But if crime did not pay for the Ikedas, at least courage and persistence did. Last week their counterfeiting came to an abrupt end as police closed in on their iron hovel. Citizens of Osaka, hearing the pathetic story of Kanji and Yoshino, promptly raised and sent to the jail a sympathy fund of 18,000 yen--almost twice what the Ikedas had been able to paint for themselves.

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