Issue:
November 2025
Foreign correspondents were filing from Japan long before the FCCJ was founded in 1945
On the evening of December 8, 1941 Japan time, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the round-up of Tokyo-based American, British, and other Allied country foreign correspondents began.
Among those detained and accused of spying on Japan was a Canadian journalist, Phyllis Argall, who worked at a prewar publication called Japan News Week. While in custody, she later recalled, she had refused to admit to accusations by the Kempeitai military police that she had been trying to sabotage Japan with her reporting. She was physically struck by the questioning officer for her stubborn resistance.
At the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NBC and CBS radio, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Times of London, the London Daily News, and a smattering of major European wire services and newspapers still had bureaus, correspondents, or stringers working in Tokyo despite the extreme censorship Japan had imposed by then. FCCJ member Peter O'Connor has provided valuable insights into some of these journalists, as well as those connected to an East Asian network of English-language newspapers who wrote or edited for a number of them in addition to their foreign correspondent duties.
Journalists in Tokyo at the time of Pearl Harbor, at least those from the countries with which Japan was at war, were interned for months, including at Sugamo Prison. Many were repatriated in 1942 under an agreement arranged by Japan and the Allied Powers with two neutral countries, Sweden and Portugal. They travelled on the MS Gripsholm, a Swedish ship, to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique and then a Portuguese colony.
When the ship docked, they disembarked with other Allied country nationals who had been in Tokyo at the start of the war, and then reboarded other ships in port that would carry them home to New York, London, and elsewhere.
Their departure from Japan marked an inglorious end to the era of prewar correspondents that began in the 19th century. Many of the first to set foot in Japan after it opened the West were just that – writers who “corresponded” with their audience, offering personal views about the country that were published in newspapers and magazines abroad. They were a mixture of travelogs and what modern editors would decry as heavily biased, racist op-Ed pieces. The more famous correspondents included Rudyard Kipling and Jack London. The former detailed his trips through Japan, and the latter the tribulations of covering the Russo-Japanese War.
Wire services had bureaus in Tokyo, notably Reuters, Associated Press, United Press, and INS, in the first decades of the 20th century. But it would be the turbulent 1930s, especially after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, that would bring more foreign journalists to Tokyo. Even as Japanese military authorities expanded control and clamped down on any hack whose reporting they felt “failed to convey the true situation in the Far East” when it came to reporting Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and all that followed.
In this atmosphere, and with Tokyo correspondents finding that their editors were often more interested in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy than in a far-away country, it was a frustrating time to be a journalist in Japan. But names like Glen Babb and Miles Vaughn of Associated Press, Burton Crane of the Wall Street Journal, Melville James Cox of Reuters (who would die mysteriously in custody after being arrested by the Kempeitai in 1940) and the “dean” of Tokyo prewar correspondents, the New York Times and London Times’ Hugh Byas, were well-known among those who followed the news from Tokyo.
While some would go on to write books during World War II about what they’d seen before they were expelled from Japan, it is hard to get a grasp on who they were as people, and what their daily lives in Tokyo were like. Deborah Cohen’s superb 2022 book Last Call at the Hotel Imperial chronicles the professional adventures and quirky personalities of a small group of prewar American correspondents in Europe who tried, in vain, to warn isolationist America of the dangers Hitler posed. But there is no similar work on the personalities of the prewar foreign correspondents in Tokyo.
A few, especially Burton Crane, sound like characters who would have been at home in the FCCJ’s Main Bar. In addition to his day job filing business stories about Japan, Crane moonlighted as a singer, recording songs in Japanese. His 1931 single Sake ga Nomitai suggests that Crane may have been the go-to guy for any foreigner, journalist or otherwise who were new to Tokyo and wanted information on the best bars in Ginza.
We do know there was no prewar equivalent of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. Instead, most correspondents had offices in the Ginza district. In the 1930s, a number were located in the Dentsu Ginza Building and tended to congregate in that area. Favorite watering holes for German correspondents in particular, especially spy Richard Sorge whose cover was that he was working as a reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung, included the Rheingold German restaurant and a bar called the Silver Slipper, where Sorge could hold more discreet meetings.
The Imperial Hotel was also said to be something of an unofficial club for prewar foreign correspondents. So much so that wartime Hollywood propaganda films with a Japan theme, such as Blood on the Sun, appeared to have it in mind in scenes in which James Cagney, playing a prewar Tokyo-based correspondent, exchanges banter with a crowd of fellow hacks and other foreign visitors in a Tokyo hotel bar.
But it was usually left to the Japanese government, or perhaps an embassy, to gather correspondents together for more formal affairs.
For example, on September 25, 1934, Tokyo’s foreign correspondent community threw a party at the Industry Club of Japan in the Marunouchi district. The occasion was a visit to Japan by senior editors and publishers from about a dozen newspapers from around the U.S., Time magazine, and the Hearst Newspaper chain.
It was a massive affair. Attendees included all of the major Japanese newspaper heads and a Who’s Who of Japanese business and government dignitaries. Also present were eight Tokyo-based correspondents: Glenn Babb (AP), Donald Brown (New York Times), Hugh Byas, (London Times, New York Times), Burton Crane (Wall Street Journal), W. Fleisher (New York Herald Tribune), R.G. Marshall (United Press), Reginald Sweetland (Chicago Daily News) and J.R. Young (International News Service).
In the years after the Industry Club affair, press restrictions grew more strict and the number of those remaining in Tokyo would decline. With the Kempeitai keeping watch, forming any kind of independent foreign press association became impossible. Not until the end of World War II and the U.S.-led Occupation, which initially tried and failed to limit the number of foreign journalists coming into the country, would Japan see a new generation of foreign journalists with the determination and ability to create what became the FCCJ.
As noted in the club’s 50th anniversary book, a few, such as noted AP correspondent Russell Brines and Hessell Tiltman of the Manchester Guardian, had been in prewar Japan and returned during the Occupation. But most were setting foot in the country for the first time.
They went on to do stellar work, as had the generation of prewar correspondents such as Phyllis Argall, who had seen and reported a very different country. But unlike FCCJ members today, who can easily learn what postwar journalists in Japan experienced 80 years ago by simply browsing the club’s library, our prewar predecessors, due to circumstances beyond their control, lacked an institution like the FCCJ to preserve their legacy, warts and all, for future generations.
Here’s hoping that an FCCJ member eventually puts together a book about those long-ago correspondents in the manner of Cohen’s book. Working title: Last Call at the (Tokyo) Imperial Hotel.
Eric Johnston is the Senior National Correspondent for the Japan Times. The views expressed within are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Japan Times.
