eling with both passports and a suitcase full of film for his
camera.

Several years ago a Japanese named T. Tahara came to Panama as the
traveling representative of a newly organized company, the Official
Japanese Association of Importers and Exporters for Latin America, and
established headquarters in the offices of the Boyd Bros. shipping
agency in Panama.

Nelson Rounsevell, publisher of the _Panama American_, who has fought
Japanese colonization in Canal areas, printed a story that this big
businessman got very little mail, made no efforts to establish
business contacts and, in talking with the few businessmen he met
socially, showed a complete lack of knowledge about business. Tahara
was talked about and orders promptly came through for him to return to
Japan.

This was in 1936. Half a year later, a suave Japanese named Takahiro
Wakabayashi appeared in Panama as the representative of the
Federation of Japanese Importers and Exporters, the same organization
under a slightly changed name. Wakabayashi checked into the cool and
spacious Hotel Tivoli, run by the United States Government on Canal
Zone territory and, protected by the guardian wings of the somewhat
sleepy American Eagle, washed up and made a beeline for the Boyd Bros.
office, where he was closeted with the general manager for over an
hour.

Wakabayashi's business interests ranged from taking pictures of the
Canal in specially chartered planes, to negotiating for manganese
deposits and attempting to establish an "experimental station to grow
cotton in Costa Rica."

The big manganese-and-cotton-photographer man fluttered all over
Central and South America, always with his camera. One week he was in
San Jose, Costa Rica; the next he made a hurried special flight to
Bogota, Colombia (November 12, 1937); then back to Panama and Costa
Rica. He finally got permission from Costa Rica to establish his
experimental station.

In obtaining that concession he was aided by Giuseppe Sotanis, an
Italian gentleman wearing the fascist insignia in the lapel of his
coat, whom he met at the Gran Hotel in San Jose. Sotanis, a former
Italian artillery officer, is a nattily dressed, slender man in his
early forties who apparently does nothing in San Jose except study his
immaculate finger nails, drink Scotch-and-sodas, collect stamps and
vanish every few months only to reappear again, still studying his
immaculate finger nails. It was Sotanis who arranged for Nicaragua