Cord Anderson Honolulu

Japanese easily plotted attack route, American blunders allowed surprise ...

On Oct. 22, 1941, the passenger ship Taiyo Maru left Yokohama for Hawaii, carrying several hundred American families and at least two Japanese spies.

The Americans were headed home, sailing from a country where political barometers signaled gathering war clouds between the United States and Japan. With militarists in control of Japan's government, the Imperial Army overran Manchuria a decade earlier and had been fighting in China since 1937.

Washington had frozen Japanese assets in the United States and in 1940 stopped exports of oil, scrap iron, steel and aviation gasoline. Japan's generals now looked south to the Philippines, Malaya and Southeast Asia for raw materials to resupply their war machine. But there was one force capable of blocking their expansionist policies - the U.S. Pacific Fleet, stationed at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands.

The two spies were naval officers masquerading as ship's doctor and purser. They were aboard to gather information on winds and atmospheric pressure, chart the best refueling locations and especially to report if they were sighted by other ships. The vessel ignored normal traffic lanes and charted an unusual course - north to Japan's Kurile Islands, then east, and finally south to Honolulu.

The trip was uneventful. They saw no ships. No ships saw them.

On Nov. 1, Suguru Suzuki, the phony purser whose military job was a study of American air power, spotted a U.S. patrol plane from Pearl Harbor and made a critical notation: "Reconnaisance line - 200 miles." It meant that was the limit American search planes probed the northern waters around the giant naval base.

The seemingly routine trip of the Taiyo Maru was, in fact, an intelligence-gathering voyage as she carefully plotted a 3,100-mile course across the northern Pacific, sometimes called the Vacant Sea.

When the ship docked in Honolulu, Suzuki went to the Japanese Consulate and delivered 97 detailed questions written on a tiny ball of rice paper. The questions, drafted in Tokyo, were passed on to Takeo Yoshikawa, a naval intelligence officer who had been in Hawaii for eight months operating under an alias as a consular official. Disguised as a Filipino, he also worked in U.S. officers' clubs.

Yoshikawa, a key player in Tokyo's plans, had one job - gather as much information as possible on the U.S. fleet, air strength and anti-aircraft defenses.

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