Jap Sailors

No Cordiality for Jap Sailors On Visit to Suva

Prom Our Own Correspondent NO red carpet, brass bands or potted palms were out when the Japanese ship Tenyo Maru, in June, brought the Rising Sun flag back to Suva for the second time since the Pacific War. (The first Japanese call, in 1954, was merely to land two sailors for hospital treatment).

Normally anything unusual at the King’s Wharf creates lively interest, but there was a marked lack of cordiality in the expressions of the Fijians and others who casually looked the ship (11,224 tons gross) over. The Japanese crew stared

back impassively.

Not quite so impassive was a Jap anese who was charged at the Magistrate’s Court with non-pay nent of duty on a wristlet watch. (He had taken the watch ashore md, for obvious reasons, had not ;aken it back to the ship). He was ined £25.

Some of the habits of some of the lapanese—more particularly those nvolving extremely public breaches »f sanitary regulations were tartling.

“You’re in Fiji—not Japan!” shouted a Fijian woman with un- Fijian contempt when, while sweep ing in a block of flats, she spotted Japanese sailors making very un hygienic use of the main entrance.

Whether or not the aliens under stood the lady’s forceful English,

there was no mistaking the threat of the brandished broom, and they decamped with all speed.

Tenyo Maru is the mother-ship of the American-controlled, Jap anese-operated tuna fleet based at Pago Pago. She came to Suva to load 950 tons of fuel oil.