he S.S. "Columbus" was registered as an American
fishing vessel under certificate of registry No. 235,912, issued at
Los Angeles. The vessel is owned by the Columbus Fishing Company of
Los Angeles. The captain, R.I. Suenaga, is a twenty-six-year-old
Japanese, born in Hawaii and a full-fledged American citizen. The
navigator and one sailor are also Japanese, born in Hawaii but
American citizens. The crew of ten consists entirely of Japanese born
in Japan.

The ten boats which fly the American flag but are manned by Japanese
crews are: "Alert," "Asama," "Columbus," "Flying Cloud," "Magellan,"
"Oipango," "San Lucas," "Santa Margarita," "Taiyo," "Wesgate."

Each boat carries a short-wave radio and has a cruising range of from
three to five thousand miles, which is extraordinary for just little
fishing boats. They operate on the high seas and where they go, only
the master and crew and those who send them know. The only time anyone
gets a record of them is when they come in to refuel or repair.

In the event of war half a dozen of these fishing vessels, stretched
across the Pacific at intervals of five hundred or a thousand miles,
would make an excellent system of communication for messages which
could be relayed from one to another and in a few moments reach their
destination.

In Colon on the Atlantic side and in Panama on the Pacific, East and
West literally meet at the crossroads of the world. The winding
streets are crowded with the brown and black people who comprise
three-fourths of Panama's population. On these teeming, hot, tropical
streets are some three hundred Japanese storekeepers, fishermen,
commission merchants and barbers-few of whom do much business, but all
of whom sit patiently in their doorways, reading the newspapers or
staring at the passer-by.

I counted forty-seven Japanese barbers in Panama and eight in Colon.
In Panama they cluster on Avenida Central and Calle Carlos A. Mendoza.
On both these streets rents are high and, with the exception of
Saturdays when the natives come for haircuts, the amount of business
the barbers do does not warrant the three to five men in each shop.
Yet, though they earn scarcely enough to meet their rent, there is not
a lowly barber among them who does not have a Leica or Contax camera
with which, until the sinking of the "Panay," they wandered around,
photographing the Canal, the islands around the Canal, the coast line,
and the topography of the region.

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