After this the policeman and Hayashi started cross-examining me again, with their unfailing politeness, of course. After repeating several times all the old questions about where I had crossed the hills etc. they wanted to know where my next halt was. I asked for my chart.
I measured off the distance of my next day’s flight, and said that I would alight at Kochi.
China Metro Map Photo Gallery
‘But it is not permit to go to Kochi.’
‘Oh, but it is; I have permission.’
I hunted through my papers and produced a letter from the British Consul-General saying that the Japanese permitted me to alight at Kochi. I might have saved myself the trouble; the police had instructions that I was not to approach Japan anywhere between Kagoshima and Tokyo, except for one place, Katsuura.
At last I was allowed to go to bed. I found it hard to stifle my yawns but Hayashi, I thought, had stood up remarkably well to the ordeal of five hours of nearly continuous questioning. I followed the lovely little Japanese maiden up the stairs into a bedroom. A faint rustle made me turn round – the policeman was fanning himself at my elbow. The walls of my room were all thin sliding panels; I slid one to find a Japanese couple asleep in the middle of the floor in another room. My room had a bed in it which the Japanese no doubt thought a prize exhibit of occidental furniture, a hideous cumbersome old-fashioned double bedstead with brass knobs. But I slept in it well enough. Next morning when I awoke, I groaned. I wished that I could rest for a day, but what chance would I have of rest? The Japanese would never believe that I could be subject to fatigue, they would be doubly suspicious, and every official in the district would come in smiling to hiss questions at me. How I longed for an uninhabited island, or uninhabited sea.
