Rumbles From the Coast

The FBI methodically rounded up alien spies and suspects on the West Coast:

P:In Salinas, Calif, they picked up three Japanese priests in a Buddhist temple. One priest was Koyo Tamanaha, a onetime Tokyo police officer.

P:Yaiohi Takatayashi, proprietor of a Japanese laundry, was identified as a friend of one of Emperor Hirohito's brothers.

P:From Jap aliens, FBI men took guns, floodlights, cameras, radios, binoculars, a microphone, an amplifier, a box of sulfuric acid, 14,833 rounds of shotgun ammunition, 60,845 rounds of rifle ammunition.

P:On the 2,300-acre Ellis H. Spiegl ranch near Chualar, FBI agents searched 26 cabins, arrested Shunso Matsuda. Foreman of a gang of 250 Japanese laborers, Matsuda calls himself "the Emperor of Chualar."

P:In San Francisco, three employes of the Yokohama Specie Bank were seized. Two of the three, Harui Aoki and Uma Ikeda, are reserve officers in the Imperial Japanese Army. Said Aoki: "I'd rather die than fight Japan."

These hit-&-run raids did not satisfy the West Coast. The Coast was not scared, not angry, but anxious. Westerners have a tradition of meeting violence with quicker vengeance. From the West Coast a cry went up: "Give us martial law!"

West Coast citizens knew that martial law would mean loss of their civil liberties, but they wanted it anyhow. They feared the Japs in their midst.

Some 88% of the 126,947 Japs in the U.S. live along the Pacific Coast. California alone has 33,569 alien Japanese, another 60,148 U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. In the eyes of Tokyo, even the most domesticated U.S.-born Nisei are loyal subjects of Japan. In sum: California is Japan's Sudetenland.

California's Attorney General Earl Warren last week said he favored martial law. Under martial law, Nisei as well as alien Japanese could be removed from defense areas. Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles did not want martial law. The Federal Government, he said, has been lax in dealing with the alien problem. He suggested that Western States move enemy aliens and Nisei to inland farms. A committee of West Coast Congressmen thought that some useful aliens could be licensed, allowed to stay.

Visiting Columnist Walter Lippmann had a novel solution: "Any one who comes here from Washington will . . . be convinced that the distance is too great, that communication is too difficult, and that the questions are often too peculiar to be dealt with by referring them back and forth. . . . There is needed in the Pacific Coast region not only unity of military command . . . but also a unity of civil authority . . . a governor general. . . ."

Whatever the solution, the West Coast wanted one quickly. Its uneasiness was growing. In Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, a battered mess of old metal dumped on a dock--the wreckage of Japanese planes and of U.S. planes destroyed by the Japs at Pearl Harbor--was a sinister reminder to West Coasters of what neglect and apathy can do in wartime. There was heard again the old muttered word, called up out of the smoky history of pistol battles, its syllables still rumbling like the horse hoofs of a posse ". . . Vigilantes."

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