The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 25 (2014)
Copyright © 2014 Etsuko Taketani. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

“Spies and Spiders”: Langston Hughes andTranspacific Intelligence Dragnets

Etsuko Taketani*

The section of Langston Hughes’s memoir I Wonder as I Wander (1956)
titled “Spies and Spiders” is more than the wanderlust-inspired story of apoet’s experience of being harassed by the Japanese police. As he recounts
in the memoir, having freshly arrived in East Asia in June 1933 after a year
in the Soviet Union, Hughes—the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissanceknown in his time as a radical of the black Left—found himself a focus ofJapanese authorities’ anti-Communist paranoia, which resulted in his
expulsion from the country. Hughes makes the following observation about
his humiliating experience: “I, a colored man, had lately been all around theworld, but only in Japan, a colored country, had I been subjected to police
interrogation and told to go home and not return again. The word ‘Fascist’
was just coming into general usage then. When I got to Honolulu, I said in
a newspaper interview that in my opinion Japan was a Fascist country.”1 Yet
two decades later, even as he was composing his memoir about these events,
Hughes suffered through another ordeal resulting from anti-Communist
fervor, this time in the United States at the hands of Joseph McCarthy and,more portentously, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for
the Allied Powers in American-occupied postwar Japan. Published during
the Cold War era, Hughes’s memoir, as I hope to show in this essay, affords*Professor, University of Tsukuba

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significant insight into the intelligence dragnets created by multiple states
before World War II and after, a theater of secret war on dissent that was notconfined to a national scope.
Hughes’s testimony before McCarthy’s subcommittee during the reign ofMcCarthyist terror that attempted to silence dissent is a story familiar toscholars. Hughes was served with a subpoena to appear before the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation and was subsequently questioned
by McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who had helped prosecute
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet
Union. Less well known is the poet’s ensnarement in a red-baiting smear
campaign conducted by the American occupying forces in postwar Japan.
Over the course of this campaign, MacArthur used confiscated Japanesepolice and court records to produce intelligence reports on the Soviet
spymaster, Richard Sorge, and his ring. MacArthur’s reports from Tokyo
unsettled the American nation with their revelations—such as their namingof Agnes Smedley, a radical writer and Hughes’s friend, as both a principal
member of the Sorge spy ring and an American “traitor” undermining the
war against Communism in Asia, a charge with repercussions that eventuallyextended to Hughes. Thus in US-occupied postwar Japan, by exposing thesearchived reports, MacArthur resurrected charges of Soviet espionage that
had been leveled against Hughes in the 1930s.
MacArthur’s actions and the climate of civil liberties abuses in the
McCarthy era notably influenced Hughes’s retrospective narrative of his
experience in Asia. He not only muted his sympathy for Communism but
also omitted several important particulars about his travels from thepublished version of I Wonder, which I have attempted to recover througharchival work. In this essay I retrace the underground (and surface) routes
that Hughes took in navigating, and at times slipping right through, theintelligence dragnets and discuss how I Wonder committed to publicmemory the secret war on dissent in the 1930s, revealing it as a force thateerily shaped the international blueprint for the Cold War.

Hughes Goes to Tokyo
As described in I Wonder, Hughes’s travels in Asia were from the startdelimited by an anti-Soviet Japanese police net. After crossing the Soviet
border into Japanese-ruled Korea, Hughes found himself trailed by Japanese
agents, “always a dozen or so yards behind,” everywhere he went. Soon
after he arrived in port in Japan proper, the police visited to inspect his

“Spies and Spiders”

27

papers, asking “why [he] had been in Russia, how long, and for what goodreason” (IWAIW, 237–38). Knowing that the Japanese customs authorities“confiscate most written material coming out of the Soviet Union,” he wascareful not to bring with him manuscripts or photographs that might
incriminate him as a radical. Hughes had sent such materials back to theUnited States in care of his friend and patron, Noël Sullivan.2 These
circumstances may suggest that Hughes, arriving from the Soviet Union,
was regarded as persona non grata from the outset of his stay in Japan.
Despite police xenophobia, however, Hughes recalls the many Japanesepeople who extended their hospitality to him as being “most gracious”(IWAIW, 242).
Hughes was not unknown as a poet to Japanese readers and critics. His
picture had appeared on the front cover of a Japanese literary magazine, andin the memoir he recalls that in it, “I appeared quite Japanese, with my eyesslanting a bit” (IWAIW, 242). In an address to a luncheon at the prestigious
Pan-Pacific Club in Tokyo, Hughes spoke on American racism and the proJapanese sentiments of black Americans in a manner that gratified his hosts,
playing into their vanity. At least one member of the audience, however—
the wife of a consular official of the American embassy, who had been
seated next to Hughes—thought that the poet had done his country adisservice (IWAIW, 243). In any case, it is an irony of fate that the rhetoricalconformity of this speech to Japanese expectations led the Federal Bureau
of Investigation to regard it as demonstrating pan-colored identification
with the Japanese on Hughes’s part.
Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover was informed that during the visit of Hughes to Japan, he talked of“the alleged ill-treatment of the negroes” and predicted that “there would
one day come a war in which all the colored races, black, yellow, and red,
would join in the subjugation of the whites.” The (female) informant who
reported on the speech (who may or may not have been the wife of theAmerican consular official—her name was blacked out in the released FBIfile) claimed to have heard Hughes say that “there was a natural bond
between these colored races and that their opposition to the white raceshould be expressed in combat.” Obviously, she attributed to Hughes thesestatements that she thought he would have made. She concluded, as quoted
in a 1942 report, that “possibly HUGHES is presently engaged in subversive
activities” in the United States.3
If the speech by Hughes in Tokyo led the informant—and the FBI—tosuspect him of harboring dangerously pro-Japanese sentiments, how could

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the poet’s stock have ostensibly fallen so abruptly in Japan that the Japanesepolice would label him politically undesirable so soon afterward? The
actions of the police leading up to his arrest were as mysterious to Hughes
in 1933 as they may seem today. After his arrest, Hughes was astonished tolearn that the Japanese police had compiled “an almost complete dossier on
everything [he] had done in both Tokyo and Shanghai” (IWAIW, 268) andthat this dossier aimed at supporting allegations that he was a Soviet spy
rather than a tourist.
Hughes speculates in I Wonder that the police began surveilling him
when he visited the Tsukiji Little Theater. Visiting the Tsukiji was one ofHughes’s first undertakings on arriving in Tokyo, where he stayed at theImperial Hotel, and he believed that Seki Sano—a Japanese stage director
in exile and a friend from Moscow who had helped him plan his trip toTokyo—had probably written to members of the theater about his coming
visit. In Hughes’s account, he went backstage in order to meet the cast, whogreeted him with open arms, hailing him as “the first Negro writer to visit
their theater” (IWAIW, 241). Subsequently, through the acquaintances hemade at Tsukiji, Hughes came to meet a circle of Japanese proletarian andleft-wing writers, artists, directors, and actors who shared his intellectual
views and political leanings.4
The Japanese police decoded these connections as suggesting an
underground network of Communists, or members of the Comintern, who
aimed at overthrowing the Japanese imperial government and establishinga Soviet Japan, and, as I shall discuss further, Hughes fell under suspicion
for being a sort of “international courier” who used the role of tourist as acover (IWAIW, 266). In I Wonder, the construal of Hughes’s Asian travelsby the Japanese police thus functions as a narrative contrapuntal to his own
account of his aim of visiting sights of interest, which suggests that theroute the poet traveled ran perilously close to the theater of counterintelligence operations meant to block the spread of dissent into Japan bycrippling the Japanese Communist Party through one mass arrest after
another of members and sympathizers.

Shanghai’s White Terror
The anti-Soviet police net in which Hughes became caught operated notjust domestically but internationally as well, stretching as far as Shanghai,
for which Hughes departed by ship on July 1, 1933. As biographer Faith
Berry reports, “the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board had warned the“Spies and Spiders”

29Japanese consulate in Shanghai to track [Hughes’s] every move when hearrived there.”5 During his two weeks in Shanghai, Japanese intelligenceagents apparently monitored his activities closely, as they had in Tokyo,
compiling information that could support the case against “Spy Hughes.”
The question remains, however, as to why the Japanese police continued tosurveil the poet, and with increased intensity, in Shanghai. I suggest that theanswer follows the status of Shanghai as a front in a cold war in Asia—that
is, as a theater of an undeclared, secret war against Soviet Communism in
the 1930s.
The international city of Shanghai was a haven for radical intellectuals
and home to the active underground Chinese Communist Party, but it was
simultaneously an environment notoriously hostile to Communists andCommunist sympathizers. “All sorts of police” operated in the city, many
focused on combating the Comintern and the Chinese Left. Hughes recounts
in his memoir that during his stay, “a meeting of students at the Chinese
Y.M.C.A. on Szechuen Road was invaded by the British Sikh police andbroken up for harboring ‘radicals.’” Moreover, the “dreaded secret agents,
the Blue Shirts” of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Nationalist Party that ruled
much of China under Chiang Kai-shek, had earned a reputation in Shanghai
as fascistic, given its members’ open admiration of Mussolini, antiCommunist sentiments, and use of violence (IWAIW, 248).6 Under the
KMT’s white terror, left-wing Chinese people lived in constant danger ofassassination or midnight arrest and summary execution, while students
were “imprisoned for harboring ‘dangerous thoughts’ against Chiang KaiShek” (IWAIW, 249). The KMT government, which concentrated its efforts
on suppressing the Chinese Communist Party rather than opposing Westernimperialism in China, in effect colluded with foreign powers in China in thepersecution of radicals based on their shared hostility to the Comintern andChinese (and world) revolution.
Early drafts of I Wonder portray the poet as both a witness of andparticipant in this cold war, which in 1930s Shanghai was indeed rather
intense. In a draft of a section titled “Shanghai Terror” that would be cut
from the published 1956 version of the memoir—an omission that, as I willargue below, reflected the imperative that Hughes hide his connection withAgnes Smedley—Hughes recounts his navigation of the perilous channelsof Soviet-allied internationalism in Shanghai. As he describes it, “the highly
melodramatic situation that I walked into the next day in Shanghai I might
have avoided had I realized the terror and tension in the Far East which theproximity of the Soviet Union, plus the undeclared Japanese-Chinese War,

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Etsuko Taketani

had created.” Nonetheless, the day after he reached Shanghai, Hughes
recalls telephoning the office of Harold R. Isaacs, a radical American
journalist and editor of the China Forum, a newspaper serving Chinese
Communists. No one answered Hughes’s call to the newspaper office. “No
wonder!” writes Hughes, who walked over to Isaacs’s apartment from his
hotel and learned that Chiang Kai-shek’s agents “had just wrecked [Isaacs’s]
office with axes the day before.”7
According to early drafts of the memoir, Hughes had called on Isaacs at
the urging of Smedley, who had left Shanghai for Russia shortly before
Hughes left Moscow. He writes, “I could very well have gotten around
Shanghai alone and found ways of enjoying myself. But because Agnes
Smedly [sic] in Moscow had said I should meet Harold Isaacs, editor of the
China Forum, according to her the brightest young American journalist in
the Orient—I went to call on him.”8 Drafts of I Wonder also relate that in
Moscow, Smedley “had wanted to give [Hughes] a letter to Madame Sun
Yat Sen in Shanghai” but that the poet had declined in view of the turmoil
in Asia.9 Madame Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ching-ling), the young widow of thefounder of the Republic of China, was known for her left-wing sympathies
and unguarded criticism of Chiang Kai-shek, her brother-in-law. Nonetheless, Hughes asked Isaacs to arrange a meeting for him with her, and a weekor so after Isaacs phoned Madame Sun, she “graciously invited [Hughes] toher home in the French Concession for dinner.” Hughes knew that thisarrangement might be “dangerous,” since Madame Sun was under constantsurveillance and frequently threatened with assassination because of her
politics. However, Chiang’s agents could not carry out this threat, asMadame Sun—“The First Lady of China,” as Hughes calls her—was too
famous internationally to assassinate without great difficulty, and themeeting passed without incident. Madame Sun Yat-sen’s “own car took me
to my hotel,” Hughes writes, adding, “Even the gangsters would hardly takea shot at her car—besides, it was bullet proof, too.”10 In the publishedversion of I Wonder, there is no mention of Isaacs’s presence, and themeeting’s political undertone is treated circumspectly.
A reconstruction of Hughes’s sojourn in Shanghai from archival material,
including drafts of I Wonder and his pocket diary, suggests that Hughes
made contact with others of Smedley’s associates who would have beenconnected, whether directly or indirectly, to the Chinese Communist Party
and the Comintern. Isaacs, Smedley’s colleague, not only arranged for
Hughes to meet with Madame Sun but also with Lu Hsin (Lu Xun), a famous
modern Chinese writer, who was then under the threat of the white terror in“Spies and Spiders”

31

Shanghai.11 Since it was unsafe to meet in public, Isaacs invited the Chinese
writer to his apartment on the evening of July 5, 1933,12 an occasion that
Hughes chose to describe simply as “a private gathering” in the publishedversion of I Wonder (IWAIW, 256). The pocket diary that Hughes kept whilein Shanghai also registers the names of leftist intellectuals and agents andtheir underground activities, in which Smedley and Isaacs closelycollaborated. Hughes jotted down the following:
Lu Sin [sic]: Gorky of China. Supervises trans. from Russian andJapanese. Aids young writers . . . Head L. L. Writers. . . .
Chen Han-seng—student of rural economy . . . Am. returned student. . . .
League for Civil Rights active member and worker and Mrs. Sun. Now
most workers terrorized by latest murder of Yang Chien, Pres.
League still interested in Ruegg Case . . . Gertrude Ruegg Defense
Comittie [sic].
Chinese R. Aid must operate underground here. Many arrest in last 2
years. Most of work crushed.13
Some decoding is in order here. The “League for Civil Rights” to which
Hughes refers was an organization chaired by Madame Sun in which
Smedley, Isaacs, and Lu Hsin were active members. At the time, the league
was being terrorized by Chiang Kai-shek, whose agents assassinated its
general secretary in June 1933, shortly before Hughes’s arrival in Shanghai.
Among other campaigns, the league was involved in defending Comintern
agents Paul and Gertrude Ruegg, known as Mr. and Mrs. Hilaire Noulens,
who had been arrested in June 1931 in what was known as the “Ruegg
case.” Smedley and Isaacs had joined Madame Sun and Chen Han-seng,himself a Comintern agent, on the Ruegg Defense Committee, which wasworking to publicize the case internationally in order to pressure the KMTto release the foreign political prisoners. The organization that Hughes
refers to as “Chinese R. Aid,” or the Chinese branch of International Red
Aid, which was connected with the Comintern, had also mounted a campaign
in support of the couple. Hughes records that this organization, underconstant attack from Chiang’s white terror, which “crushed most of [its]work,” had to “operate underground.”Hughes’s diary also reveals his contacts with the underground literary
movement in Shanghai. In the passage cited above, “L. L. Writers” refers to
the League of Left-Wing Writers established in March 1930 under the
direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party to promote the32

Etsuko Taketani

production of proletarian art. Lu Hsin was the head of the league. With the
exception of several established writers, the membership comprised young
writers. In early 1931, five members of the organization (now known as“the five martyrs”) were arrested by the British police in the Shanghai
International Settlement, along with other nameless Chinese Communist
Party members. They were turned over to the KMT authorities in Chinese
territory and slaughtered. Hughes learned of this incident from Smedley inMarch 1931, right after it transpired, when he was in the United States.
(News of the incident was also reflected in the league’s appeal and manifesto
in memory of the Chinese writers “butchered” by the KMT, which appearedin New Masses in June.)14
To protest such civil liberties abuses, Hughes wrote an article titled “FromMoscow to Shanghai” for the July 14, 1933, issue of the China Forumedited by Isaacs. In it, he offers the following scathing criticism of fascist
oppression of cultural dissenters by the KMT, aided and abetted by Westernimperialist powers in Shanghai:Being a writer, naturally I am interested in how the Shanghai writers
live, my fellow-workers in the craft of the word. But to my amazement,
I learn that writers in Shanghai do not live—they are killed! . . . I haveheard the names of the murdered writers before. See how long the list
is: Hu Yeh-ping, Li Wei sen, Jou Shih, Feng Kang, and countless,nameless others. . . . Without shame the powers that be confer on young
Chinese writers’ bodies full of bullets—as openly as medals of honor
are awarded in the West. . . . [T]he more famous they become as writers,
the more surely do their names go on the death-lists of the NankingShanghai militarist-imperialist dictatorship. The government of China
does not like writers.15
In contributing to the China Forum in this way, Hughes joined in the
struggle to defend the pro-Communist literary front and the revolution in
China (and the world).
To the extent that the sojourn of Hughes in Shanghai can be reconstructedfrom archival materials, the route he traveled coincided with locales
associated with the Chinese Communist Party and the Comintern
underground—a reality elided from the final text of I Wonder. Despite thewhite terror, Hughes managed to evade the calamities that befell his Chinese
comrades; his extraterritorial status as a US citizen allowed him to act withrelative impunity in Shanghai, where he remained beyond the reach of

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33

Chinese law. (He traveled in Asia on a US passport issued in 1931, which
included a Japanese visa issued at Yokohama on June 27, 1933.)16 However,during his two weeks in Shanghai, Japanese agents secretly tracked his
movements. By the time he once again set foot on Japanese soil, the stage
was set for him to be cast in the role of spy by a Japanese police dragnet.

Mata Hari and Spy Hughes
Though Hughes’s description of his encounter with the Tokyo police in I
Wonder has frequently been viewed as a forthright depiction of Japanese
authorities’ efforts to silence dissent under fascism, the poet’s narrative,
which unfolds like a spy thriller, imbues this view with some ambiguity, as
it renders the remembered past in a manner more fictitious than factual.
Particularly in the section of I Wonder titled “Spies and Spiders,” as thenarrative of the Japanese police pursuing suspicions that Hughes thecharacter is a Soviet spy unfolds, Hughes the memoirist employs the “spypicture” Mata Hari as a subtext for evoking suspense and intrigue (IWAIW,
261). Given these problems of representation, “Spies and Spiders” conveys
more about the memoirist writing in the 1950s than about the experiences
he is recalling.
As he describes in I Wonder, Hughes sailed from Shanghai in mid-Julyaboard the Japanese ship Taiyo Maru, bound for San Francisco by way of
Kobe and Yokohama. During the ship’s three-day layover in Yokohama,
Hughes took a train to Tokyo and once again checked in at the Imperial
Hotel. By nightfall on July 23, 1933, Hughes “found [himself] back in thesame pleasant room [he] had had a month before at the Imperial, with thesame water lilies floating on the pond in the courtyard outside [his] window”(IWAIW, 261). Behind the scenes, however, his situation was assuming awholly different aspect.
Although Hughes was perhaps unaware of how his situation had changed
at the time, by introducing a screening of Mata Hari to the narrative of“Spies and Spiders,” he invites the reader to engage in a double reading andregard his situation not only from his perspective but also from that of theJapanese secret police. In the narrative, Hughes goes to dine at the roof
garden of the Imperial Hotel, where a movie is being shown. The movie is
Mata Hari (1931), “a spy picture” starring Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro,
the latter of whom Hughes had met in California (IWAIW, 261). Loosely
based on the life of Mata Hari, an exotic dancer executed for espionage
during World War I, the film follows two plot lines: Mata Hari’s seduction

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Etsuko Taketaniof a young Russian officer to obtain secret documents in his possession, andthe efforts of the French secret police to track her down. In “Spies andSpiders,” this spy picture functions to inform the reader of the suspense andintrigue unfolding around the moviegoer Hughes, an alleged spy for theSoviet Union.
During the screening of the film on the roof garden, Hughes is interrupted
twice by taps on his shoulder, signaling the intermingling of the interior andexterior spy stories: “A pageboy tapped me on the shoulder politely and said
I was wanted on the phone. A voice on the wire identified itself as that of awriter whom I had met previously in Tokyo, and informed me that several
other Japanese writers and himself wished to honor me with a luncheon thenext day so that they might see me again before I left for America” (IWAIW,
261).
Hughes accepts the luncheon invitation and returns to his table and thespy picture. By this time in the film, Ramon Novarro, playing the Russian
officer, “[is] about to be locked in the arms of the spy, Mata Hari.” As
Hughes watches the intrigue approach its climax, he is once againinterrupted: “Another gentle tap on my shoulder. The pageboy again. This
time he said there were some gentlemen downstairs in the lobby to see me”(IWAIW, 261).
Hughes hesitates. He “really wanted to see how the picture about spies
would turn out,” but the movie “delayed so long in reaching its climax that[he] had to leave before Greta Garbo met her fate” (IWAIW, 261).
The suspense building around Mata Hari at the climax of the film is thus
displaced onto Hughes in “Spies and Spiders,” for it becomes clear that the
gentlemen in the lobby are two Japanese secret agents who look like “fatspiders” and have come to entice Hughes into divulging incriminating
information and perhaps take him into custody. To ensnare Hughes in their
web of intrigue, the “two portly Japanese gentlemen in European clothes”
have disguised themselves as writers and brought along a small man in akimono whom they introduce as “Naoshi Takunaga [sic], the famous authorof The Street Without Sun that had been published in the United States.”
Tokunaga was a proletarian writer who had recently been imprisoned, as
Hughes had learned while in Shanghai. Hughes says to Tokunaga, “But I
thought you were in jail?” One of the disguised agents answers for the
supposed writer, “He was, but is now free, and wanted so much to meetyou” (IWAIW, 262).
The agents have succeeded in luring Hughes away from the film showing
on the rooftop garden, but as he speaks with them, he grows suspicious,

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35

especially when they ask him about Mike Gold, John Dos Passos, Claude
McKay, and Theodore Dreiser—“American left-wing writers”—in an effort
to trick him into exposing his liaisons with a literary network of Communists.
He realizes that his visitors “were not writers, they were policemen
pretending to be writers—except perhaps the little man in the dark kimono
who [Hughes] sensed was a prisoner.” When Hughes refuses to divulge any
information, the writer in the kimono “smiled wanly as if to indicate he wasrelieved that I had found out I was the center of a police trap” (IWAIW, 262).
Their operation having failed, the agents withdraw from the lobby, taking
their bait, Tokunaga, between them. As they leave, Hughes says to Tokunaga,“I hope everything comes out all right for you,” to which the latter replies
in halting English, “I, too.” Feeling that he has narrowly escaped the police
trap, Hughes returns to his room and goes to bed “wondering how Mata
Hari ended on the screen” (IWAIW, 263).
Despite the prominence of the roles that Hughes assigns to Mata Hari
and Tokunaga in “Spies and Spiders,” a chain of conflated memories
problematizes his representation of both. Although Naoshi (Sunao)
Tokunaga was a contemporary historical figure, he was neither a politicalprisoner nor in jail at the time the poet visited Japan. Moreover, Tokunaga’s
novel Taiyo no nai Machi (The street without sun) was never published in
English in the United States, though Hughes’s characterization of it suggests
the contrary. Nor is there any historical evidence to support Hughes’s
representation of the Japanese writer whom he met in the police trap as
Tokunaga. Even more problematic is a seeming slip of the pen that Hughes
makes about the spy picture Mata Hari. After relating his encounter with
Tokunaga, Hughes writes, “Pola Negri was such a beautiful spy!” (IWAIW,
263). This statement may lead the reader to wonder whether the movie that
Hughes was watching when the police sprang their trap was Mata Hari,
which stars Greta Garbo, or L’ultimo addio (Hotel Imperial), which stars
Pola Negri as a chambermaid who aids an Austrian officer in defeating a
Russian military spy.17
Regardless of whether Hughes viewed any movie on the night in question,or whether the police conducted the operation he describes, it is interesting
to consider why Hughes might have recalled the movie—whichever it
was—as “a spy picture” and why, in particular, he recalled it being Mata
Hari. Either Mata Hari or Hotel Imperial would have served equally wellto add color to the narrative, since both involve Russia, spies, and romance.
However, Hughes’s reference to Mata Hari emerges as particularly
evocative on closer examination of his (inaccurate) recollection of Tokunaga

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Etsuko Taketanias the bait in the supposed police trap that he narrowly escaped.
Given that it is historically implausible that Tokunaga played the role
Hughes describes, the reader must look elsewhere to account both for
Hughes’s knowledge of The Street without Sun and his (perhaps unconscious)
urge to insert its author into the text of his spy narrative. As his research
notes for I Wonder reveal, Hughes did not remember the writer’s namewhen he was drafting the manuscript. In attempting to come up with a nameof a decoy writer, Hughes used the title of The Street without Sun as anotation. In a memo in his research notes, he types,5 “INSERT: . . . ‘STREETWITHOUT SUN’6—name of author,” with scribbles added in the margin:“Check” and “Tukonaga [sic] (Naoshi).” Another memo bears related
notations reading “Library-Info: . . . ‘Street Without Sun’ (1929) Tokunaga(Naoshi) 1899–,” with the word “inserted” added.18 The possibility exists,of course, that a Japanese agent may have been posing as Tokunaga in thepolice operation, and Hughes may have been deceived. However, it is more
likely, and less speculative, to conclude that the poet’s displacement (ifunconscious) of Tokunaga’s identity onto the person who served as bait in
the police trap originated with Agnes Smedley.
It was from Smedley that Hughes learned of Tokunaga and his novel. In
1931, the poet sent Smedley an inscribed copy of his Not without Laughter,a novel that a New Masses reviewer observed paralleled Smedley’s Daughterof Earth (1929). In a letter that she sent Hughes in response, Smedley
recommended that Hughes read Tokunaga, whose name she misspelled as“Tokagawa”:
Have you read Tokagawa’s [sic] “The Street Without Sun?” Here wehave a Japanese left writer who has taken one single strike and in that[he] has shown us the entire history of the working class, wedding thedeepest class consciousness with art. You have a technique of writingsuperior to his—but you need—as do I—his intensity of thought, his
historic knowledge, his revolutionary consciousness. I have read his
book only in German, but it must be in English. . . . By reading it I
learned what is wrong with my book—and through it I see what iswrong with yours.19
Thus, Hughes did indeed encounter Tokunaga, but through Smedley’s
letter rather than in a trap the Tokyo police set for him.
Hughes knew that Smedley worked for the Chinese Communist Party
and the Comintern and that she was closely watched as a spy, a Mata Hari,

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37

by the police. As Smedley describes in her memoir, Battle Hymn of China,
which appeared in the summer of 1943 when she and Hughes spent time
together at the Yaddo writers and artists colony in Saratoga Springs, New
York, the Japanese newspaper Nichi-Nichi of Shanghai charged her withbeing a member of the GPU (the Soviet secret police) and of “sleeping withmilitary men to worm their secrets out of them.” The Japanese paper
declared that “this was easy” for Smedley because she was “a singer anddancer!” as Smedley recalls with amusement.20 It is also suggestive that
Smedley took the keenest interest in Hughes’s arrest. When she learned ofHughes’s expulsion from Japan, she wrote to him from Shanghai, asking
him for an account of his interrogation in Tokyo. In particular, she wanted
him to explain Japan’s “charges that you admitted you were [an] ‘agent.’”
Smedley supplied Hughes with her “strictly confidential address,”
instructing him to put the address of Randall Gould, her fellow American
journalist and editor of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury, on theoutside of the envelope and inside, “my initials. A. S.,”21 an arrangement
indicating that she was under police surveillance. In light of displaced
memories in the text, I suggest that Hughes’s compositional process andtextual unconscious were haunted by Smedley and that “Spies and Spiders”
may be read as a story about the poet’s ensnarement in the web of intrigue
that Smedley, a Mata Hari, seemed to have cast over him while in Asia (asmuch as one about the Tokyo police’s trap, with their bait being theproletarian writer Tokunaga, whom Smedley recommended Hughes read).
Indeed, in the McCarthy era from which the memoir emerged, Smedley wasfacing a charge for having spied for Soviet Russia in Asia, as I will discuss.
The Tokyo police arrested Hughes on July 24, 1933, along with theJapanese “writer friends” who came to see him at the Imperial Hotel(IWAIW, 263). Once they had him in custody at the Tokyo Metropolitan
Police Headquarters, the police interrogated him about his activities in
Moscow, Tokyo, and Shanghai, including his contacts with Sano, theTsukiji, Madame Sun, and Isaacs. Hughes recalls the police interrogation
proceeding as follows:“How did you happen to have met Seki Sano?”“At Meyerhold’s Theater in Moscow.”“He did not give you letters to bring here?”“He did not!”“No one gave you messages to bring here?”“You flatter me,” I said, “if you think I am an international courier or38

Etsuko Taketani

something. I’m not. I’m just a writer.” (IWAIW, 266)
In the published version of I Wonder, Hughes chose to omit any mentionof the fact revealed in earlier drafts that, his responses to the police here
notwithstanding, he had indeed been asked by friends in Moscow—Sano,
Smedley, Sergei Tretiakov, and Si-Lan Chen—to deliver messages in Tokyoand Shanghai.22
In grilling Hughes about his travels in the Soviet Union, China, andJapan, the Tokyo police revealed their deep concern with the kind ofinternationalism that Hughes engaged in, which they feared provided anavenue for the transmission of secret information beyond the reach of theirimmigration and thought control mechanisms, as he could use his publicpersona as a cover to traverse state boundaries with impunity. Hughes found
his treatment by the Tokyo police so disgraceful that, on landing in San
Francisco, he wrote a sharp letter of protest to the US Department of State,in which he recounts that he was detained “for more than seven hours” andthat “when [he] discovered [he] was under arrest,” his request to call the
American consulate was refused. In this letter, Hughes describes how, at theend of the long interrogation, he was “asked to swear that [he] had brought
no ‘Communistic messages’” into Tokyo, and the police finally ordered him
to “go home and stay there” and to refrain from any further communication
with Japanese nationals before his departure.23 Hughes also includes thesedetails in his memoir.
In I Wonder, Hughes describes the police harassment that he encountered
as extending to a fellow American citizen whom he befriended in Tokyo.
After his release from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters, Hughes
goes to dinner at the Imperial Hotel, where a young man stops at his table topay his respects. The young man, who has been “in Japan for two years,
working as an industrial chemist,” graduated from Hughes’s alma mater,
Central High School in Cleveland, and ends up keeping Hughes company
during his meal (IWAIW, 273). Hughes is at this time under surveillance by
two plainclothes detectives seated at a nearby table, and later he learns thatthe young man would subsequently be “requested to leave Japan” by the
Tokyo police—presumably for speaking to Hughes (IWAIW, 279).
For Hughes, the acme of Japan’s unfair treatment of him was a made-up
interview that the Tokyo police released to the press and that was publishedin Japan’s leading newspaper, the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi. In his memoir, Hughes
recalls with indignation that the Japanese newspaper quoted him as having
said that “Japan was the destined savior of the darker races of the world, the“Spies and Spiders”

39

leader of Asia, and a great stabilizing force” in China—tenets of Japanese
propaganda to which he never subscribed. “This fake interview” in the
Nichi-Nichi, writes Hughes, “seemed to me a most dastardly andcontemptible thing to impose upon a visitor” (IWAIW, 278), one last
mistreatment after many others that the Japanese police had accorded him
in the summer of 1933.
From the reader’s vantage point, the made-up interview is an especiallypuzzling episode, for no such article appears to have been published in theTokyo Nichi-Nichi, as Hughes claims. The Nichi-Nichi did publish two news
items concerning the police interrogation of Hughes on July 25, 1933, oneof which the poet read in English translation, but neither contained theinterview that Hughes describes. By pointing out this discrepancy, my aim
is not to suggest that Hughes fabricated the episode but rather to consider
the source and extent of his knowledge of the news coverage of his expulsion
in the Japanese press.
Not knowing the Japanese language, Hughes relied for his knowledge ofJapanese press coverage of his case on translated newspaper clippings sent
to him from Japan. The man who furnished Hughes with these clippings
was Alexander Buchman, who appears anonymously in I Wonder as the
young graduate of Central High School whom Hughes befriended at thedinner following his interrogation.24 In a letter to Buchman dated August 21,
1933, and sent from San Francisco, Hughes complains that some of theJapanese newspapers “are as yellow in their journalism as are our worst
American papers.”25
It is not certain whether Buchman received Hughes’s letter in Tokyo. On
August 22, 1933, the New York Times and other newspapers reported that
Buchman was arrested “during a police drive against ‘foreign radicals andpacifists’”; he was charged with “engaging in radical propaganda” andordered to leave Japan immediately. Having reportedly arrived in Japan
from the United States two months prior to his arrest, Buchman was accusedof violating the terms of his one-month visa and, moreover, “propagating
parlor bolshevism among young men and women” in Tokyo. After his
expulsion, Buchman set out on his own journey to Shanghai, where heattended the Chinese congress of the World Committee against Imperialist
War, a conference “promoted and financed by the Communist International,
adherence to which is a criminal offence in Japan.”26 He was one of about
three hundred delegates from China and abroad—Harold Isaacs was also adelegate—who planned to attend the antiwar congress organized under thechairmanship of Madame Sun Yat-sen. In the end, the young nameless40

Etsuko Taketani

graduate of Central High School in I Wonder was not merely an “industrial
chemist,” as the memoir suggests; he did not live in Japan “for two years”
and was not expelled simply for speaking to Hughes. The Tokyo police had
cause for suspecting this “friend of Langston Hughes, American Negro poetand critic” of maintaining clandestine connections to Soviet-alliedorganizations under the cover of tourism, much as they thought Hughes had
done.27 In his sightseeing adventure in Asia, Hughes thus did brush up
against what the Tokyo police suspected to be an underground network ofCommunists.
What emerges behind the Asian travels that Hughes recounts in I Wonderis the theater of a silent war on dissent that was not confined to a national
scope. Subsequent to the deportation of Hughes (and Buchman), the Tokyo
police transmitted their dossier on Hughes to the Japanese consulate inShanghai via confidential memoranda. Hughes did not know when heappealed to Washington to support his protest against Japan that the US
State Department was in possession of this dossier. The State Department
received a dispatch from the US consul general in Shanghai that included
the Tokyo police record documenting Hughes’s movements in the Far East,along with the testimony the poet gave Japanese interrogators. This report
was transmitted “from the police of the International Settlement containing
information received by the police from the Japanese Consulate General.”28
In short, Hughes’s dossier was transmitted in a succession of confidential
memos from the Metropolitan Police Board in Tokyo, to the Japanese
consulate in Shanghai, to the police of the International Settlement (where
it was translated into English by the Special Branch of the British-run
Shanghai Municipal Police [SMP]), to the American consulate in Shanghai,and finally to the US State Department, for shared use against Soviet
Communism. In its reply to Hughes’s letter, the State Department wrote thatthe poet’s activities “apparently gave rise to a suspicion that you may haveconnected with some organization advocating the overthrow of the ‘systemof private property,’ membership in which, under Japanese law, is a criminal
offense punishable by severe penalties” and that the US government had no
grounds for approaching their government about the matter.29
The Japanese police record on Hughes would remain classified until
1972 as part of the State Department’s confidential file on Hughes, the“Communist negro,”30 which it opened in 1932 while Hughes was in theSoviet Union. In the transcript of Hughes’s interrogation in the Tokyo police
detention room, he is quoted as saying:“Spies and Spiders”

41

I am connected with the following organizations:International Revolutionary Writers League.
International Revolutionary Plot Writers League.
Authors League.
Dramatist Guild.
National Association for Advancement of Coloured People.
Labourers Cultural League.
Being a Negro I have been struggling for the emancipation of the
Negros [sic] and of the oppressed masses and will continue my struggle
forever. Communism aims at the emancipation of the oppressed masses
but I still doubt whether or not complete freedom can be secured
through the realization of communism. I do not claim to be a communist
but I do not object to be regarded as a sympathizer because I sympathizewith and support all Communist movements and also the oppressedpeople. After all I am a liberalist who is interested in communism andthe struggles for the emancipation of the oppressed.31
In these statements to the Japanese police, Hughes explicitly acknowledgedthat he was a Communist sympathizer, though he did not admit that he wasan “agent.” He insisted that the object of his visit to Shanghai in 1933 was
simply “sightseeing.”32
However, the police in the International Settlement, or more precisely theSpecial Branch of the SMP, which relayed the Tokyo police record to the
US government, may not have accepted Hughes’s tourism claim. The
Special Branch, which operated, in effect, as a Far Eastern arm of MI6, theBritish Secret Intelligence Service, also opened a file on Hughes.33 An SMP
document titled “James Langston Hughes—American Negro Intellectual”
reported that Hughes was “frequently seen whilst in Shanghai” with Harold
Isaacs, whom “he had never previously met,” but that Isaacs’s “name wasgiven him by a mutual friend”—namely, Smedley—“whilst he was in
Moscow.”34
In I Wonder, Hughes’s Asian travels end with his arrival in Hawai‘ifollowing his expulsion from Japan. Significantly, the narration of this final
scene on US territory in the Pacific registers the presence of an FBI agent.
Why the FBI agent turned up “to meet” him is not explained; in the narrative,
the agent appears briefly, only to disappear without uttering a word (IWAIW,
278–79). Yet given that I Wonder was published in the 1950s, the appearanceof the FBI agent may be understood to signal to the reader that the intelligencedragnet to silence dissenters, which ensnared Hughes in its spider-like web,42

Etsuko Taketani

had already spread across the Pacific by the 1930s.

“My World Will Not End”
Hughes closes I Wonder with a description of his accidental reunion with
his Japanese comrade Seki Sano in Paris on New Year’s Eve, 1937. As thebells toll, the two old friends lift their glasses and toast the entrance of the
new year and the (seeming) exit of the poet’s decade that had been marked
by his wanderlust-inspired travels through Cuba, Haiti, the Soviet Union,
China, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and France in the 1930s. The narrative thus
draws this Japanese stage director into the poet’s international orbit once
again, aligning the lives of the two “fellow travelers” of color—one cast outof Japan on suspicion of being a Soviet spy and the other, as the reader
learns, cast out of the Soviet Union for similar reasons.35 As the memoirreaches its troubled ending, which is at once a nonending, Hughes insists,“My world will not end” (IWAIW, 405). I Wonder thus recounts a past thathas refused to end, one that continued to haunt Hughes even as he wrote thefinal version of the text.
I suggest that what made it so difficult for Hughes to bring his radical past
to a close is the historical moment of fear and suspicion of 1950s America,
when he faced a red-baiting smear campaign conducted by US occupation
forces in postwar Japan. The campaign was an offshoot of the Cold War
project to contain the spread of Soviet Communism in Asia, which the US
occupation forces had inherited, ironically, from “fascist” Japan. Over thecourse of this campaign, General MacArthur and his chief of military
intelligence, or G-2 Tokyo, Major-General Charles A. Willoughby (whomthe general described as “my lovable fascist”) issued reports on a Soviet spy
ring headed by the spymaster Richard Sorge. Sorge had been operating inShanghai and Tokyo when Hughes visited Asia in the 1930s and was
eventually executed by the Japanese wartime government on November 7,
1944. Confiscated prewar Japanese police files and court records thatsurvived wartime bombing reveal that Sorge had gathered information
through Hotsumi Ozaki. Ozaki was a journalist and member in the brain
trust of the Japanese government’s Konoye Cabinet, and as well was atranslator of Agnes Smedley’s novel Daughter of Earth.
A February 1949 press release on the intelligence report from Tokyo
titled “The Sorge Spy Ring: A Case Study in International Espionage in the
Far East” from the Department of the Army in Washington aroused
widespread controversy in the United States, not least because it characterized“Spies and Spiders”

43

an American writer and citizen, Smedley,36 as both a member of the spy ring
and a perpetrator “of the hoax that the Chinese Communists were . . . only
local agrarian revolutionists” with no connections to the Soviet Union.
Smedley, reportedly an “American-Soviet spy,” “recruited Ozaki” for Sorgein the Shanghai phase of his ring in the early 1930s. The report also claimed
that Smedley’s “hoax” swayed American foreign policy on China,
purportedly undermining the war against Communism in Asia, andultimately enabling Communism to overrun China despite America’s
support for Chiang Kai-shek, who would have remained America’s ally in
Asia.37
Smedley reacted vehemently to this public account of her espionage
activities. She termed it a “despicable lie,” pointing to the fact that the
charges were based on the files of the prewar Japanese secret police, “themost discredited agency of that enemy government.” In her view,
MacArthur’s real end in libeling her was to “‘condition the American people
into allowing him’ more troops and money to build Japan into a mighty
military base” and thus to build up a former enemy, Japan, as an anti-Soviet
bastion against Red China, because of “the defeats suffered by the Chinese
Nationalist Government.”38 Confronted with Smedley’s recriminations, theArmy in Washington admitted to a “faux pas” in making the report from
Tokyo public. “A person is innocent until proven guilty,” the Army allowed,
noting that they had insufficient proof of the accusations they had leveled at
the time the report was issued.39
Smedley’s defiance—and the Army’s retraction of their public release of
the “secret” report with “quasi-apologies”—insulted Willoughby andspurred him to launch an “epic search” for further proof to authenticate theSorge spy story.40 With the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency,
Willoughby tracked down and procured a substantial portion of the recordsof the SMP prior to the Communist takeover in China on October 1, 1949.
The SMP files proved to be a Pandora’s box, opening up “an astonishingvista on a fantastic array of Communist fronts, ancillary agencies, and thevast interlocking operations of the Third International in China.”41
Corroborating the reports from Tokyo, they revealed Smedley’s underground
activities and the numerous Chinese Communist front organizations forwhich she worked, including the Noulens Defense Committee set up by theInternational Red Aid and the China League for Civil Rights. Moreover, the
SMP records named Smedley’s “red and pink associations,” as Willoughby
dubbed them, including those with Harold Isaacs, Lu Hsin, and Langston
Hughes. As discussed, the file on Hughes that the Special Branch of the44

Etsuko Taketani

SMP opened in the early 1930s was among the records obtained by
Willoughby and the CIA. Willoughby thus successfully and hostilely
recovered the radical past of Hughes, or the “American Communist andstaff member of the International League of Revolutionary Writers,” as hecalls him, from the dusty archives of Asia.42
The spy charges against Smedley, fueled by the Cold War red-baiting
campaign, had been extended to Hughes. In 1952, Willoughby published aninnuendo-filled book titled Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring, inwhich he quotes Hughes’s poem “Goodbye Christ” (a revolutionary poem
that Hughes wrote while in the Soviet Union) to demonstrate Hughes’s
Communist sympathies. “Goodbye Christ” was a profane verse of his Soviet
year that he later “dismissed . . . as a regrettable error of his immature
youth.” Hughes—according to biographer Arnold Rampersad—practically
begged the publisher E. P. Dutton not to quote his poem in Willoughby’s
book, but his pleas were unsuccessful.43 Willoughby quotes the poem as
epitomizing the “traitorous and corrosive quality” of “the International
Union of Revolutionary Writers and its American offshoot, the League ofAmerican Writers,” of which Hughes and Smedley were members. In viewof this “typical sample of Hughes’s poetic style,” Willoughby argues, “itrequires no imagination to know what would happen to the Christianchurches in America if men of his ilk were ever to get the upper hand. Allanyone has to do to visualize the blood bath which they would stage is torefresh one’s memory about the pattern of the Soviet purges.”44 A year later,
Hughes was summoned to appear before McCarthy’s subcommittee.
During the Cold War smear campaign that US military intelligencelaunched in Tokyo, recouping the past was a political imperative. In
Shanghai Conspiracy, the reader is presented with a Pacific-centered world
map that designates the routes that Comintern agents, fellow travelers, andassociates in the 1930s navigated from Moscow, Tokyo, and Shanghai to
San Francisco and beyond. The map indicates a worldwide espionage
network, or what Willoughby called “the Communist ‘jehad’ for the
subjugation of the Western world,”45 the routes and headquarters of whichsuggestively overlap with Hughes’s route through Asia. In the publishedversion of I Wonder, Hughes largely eliminated political undertones fromthe narrative of his sojourn in Asia, to the extent that he chose to accord
Smedley only a minimal presence in the text. Nonetheless, the narrative ofHughes’s framing as a Soviet spy in prewar Japan makes I Wonder resonantwith the historical moment at home, where McCarthyist terror had reached
its height and America had begun its anti-Communist war in Asia, in which

“Spies and Spiders”

45

Japan, the former “fascist” power, played the role of America’s principal
ally against Communist China. Thus, Hughes’s memoir not only serves as atestimony of his encounter with a colored “Fascist country.” It offers insight
into the transpacific intelligence dragnets that endeavored to silencedissenters as eerily prefiguring the international Cold War blueprint.

Notes
Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1993), 277. Further references are to this edition and will be citedparenthetically as IWAIW.
2 Langston Hughes to Noël Sullivan, Trans-Siberian Express, June 12, 1933, box 40,
Noël Sullivan Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
3 R. P. Hood (Special Agent in Charge) to J. Edgar Hoover, Los Angeles, February 7,
1942, Langston Hughes, FBI file no. 100-151-39.
4 Hughes recorded in the pocket diary the following names of leading Japanese
proletarian theater activists and writers: Korea Senda, Tomoyoshi Murayama (a Japan
Communist Party member who was then in jail), Mikio Osawa, Sakae Kubo, and S.
(Seikichi) Fujimori. Langston Hughes, pocket diary: kept while in China and Japan,(1933), Papers of Langston Hughes, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (hereafter
cited as Hughes Papers/HL).
5 Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and beyond Harlem (Westport, CT: Lawrence
Hill, 1983), 193.
6 For the Blue Shirts and fascism, see Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution:
China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1974), 31–84.
7 “I Wonder as I Wander,” draft, 519, box 307, folder 5014, Langston Hughes Papers,
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University, New Haven (hereafter cited as Hughes Papers/YU); see also “I Wonder
as I Wander,” draft, 519, box 306, folder 5013, Hughes Papers/YU.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 510; see also “I Wonder as I Wander,” draft, 508–9, box 306, folder 5013,
Hughes Papers/YU.
10 “I Wonder as I Wander,” draft, 521–22, box 307, folder 5014, Hughes Papers/YU;
see also “I Wonder as I Wander,” draft, 520–21, box 306, folder 5013, Hughes Papers/YU.
11 This famous Chinese writer’s name is also spelled Lu Hsün in the Wade-Giles
system. I adopt “Lu Hsin” here as Hughes used this transliteration in his memoir.
12 Shen Pengnian, “Lu Xun Huijian Xiushi Jiqi Beiwu Shijian” [The meeting between
1

46

Etsuko Taketani

Lu Xun and Hughes and the incident of Lu being falsely accused], Shaoxing Lu Xun
Yanjiu 27 (July 2005): 125–26.
13 Hughes, pocket diary, Hughes Papers/HL.
14 Agnes Smedley to Langston Hughes, Shanghai, March 13, 1931, box 147, folder
2735, Hughes Papers/YU; Left Writers’ League of China, “A Letter to the World: An
Appeal from the Writers of China,” New Masses, June 1931, 14–15.
15 Langston Hughes, “From Moscow to Shanghai,” China Forum, July 14, 1933, 5.
16 Shanghai
Municipal Police, “James Langston Hughes—American Negro
Intellectual,” 1, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, RG 263, box 40, file D-5127(Microfilm series M-1750, roll 16), National Archives and Records Administration(NARA), College Park, MD.
17 Hughes may have conflated the movies because of the linguistic association of Hotel
Imperial and the Imperial Hotel, where he supposedly watched the movie. The Universityof Missouri Press edition of I Wonder as I Wander changes “Greta Garbo” to “Pola
Negri” throughout, as typographical errors.
18 Research note, box 304, folder 4997; research note, box 304, folder 4996, Hughes
Papers/YU.
19 Agnes Smedley to Langston Hughes, Shanghai, March 14, 1931, box 147, folder
2735, Hughes Papers/YU.
20 Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), 97.
21 Agnes Smedley to Langston Hughes, Shanghai, October 31, 1934, Hughes Papers/
HL.
22 “I Wonder as I Wander,” draft, 510, box 307, folder 5014, Hughes Papers/YU; seealso “I Wonder as I Wander,” draft, 508–9, box 306, folder 5013, Hughes Papers/YU.
23 Langston Hughes to US Department of State, San Francisco, August 30, 1933, box
157, folder 2907, Hughes Papers/YU.
24 Alex Buchman to Langston Hughes, Tokyo, July 24, 1933, box 36, folder 630,
Hughes Papers/YU.
25 Langston Hughes to Alex Buchman, San Francisco, August 21, 1933, box 36, folder
630, Hughes Papers/YU.
26 “American ‘Radical’ Ordered from Japan,” Christian Science Monitor, August 24,
1933, 3; “Tokyo Police Oust American Pacifist: Alexander Buchman Is Suspected of
Radical Activity on Way to Shanghai Anti-War Parley,” New York Times, August 23,
1933, 11; “Japanese Order American Youth to Quit Country,” Chicago Daily Tribune,
August 23, 1933, 12.
27 “Japan Deports Anti-War Congress Delegates,” August 23, 1933, newspaper
clipping, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, RG 263, entry Murphy Papers
China, box 15, NARA.
28 Edwin S. Cunningham (American Consul General, Shanghai) to Secretary of State,

“Spies and Spiders”

47

dispatch, August 28, 1933, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, box
4507, 800.00B Langston Hughes, NARA.
29 Stanley K. Hornbeck, Chief of Division of Far Eastern Affairs, Department of State,to Langston Hughes, September 25, 1933, box 157, folder 2907, Hughes Papers/YU.
30 Embassy of the United States of America, London, to Secretary of State,memorandum, May 29, 1933, RG 59, box 4507, 800.00B Langston Hughes, NARA.
31 S. 2. Special Branch of the Shanghai Municipal Police, “Movements of James
Langston Hughes, American Nigger Writer, in Japan,” August 21, 1933, a copy enclosed
in Cunningham to Secretary of State, RG 59, box 4507, 800.00B Langston Hughes,
NARA.
32 Ibid.
33 Shanghai Municipal Police file card on Langston Hughes, Records of the Central
Intelligence Agency, RG 263, entry Shanghai Police Files, box 5, NARA.
34 “James Langston Hughes—American Negro Intellectual,” 2.
35 Sano was ordered out of the country by Soviet authorities in 1937. By the time of
Hughes’s reunion with Sano, the Soviet Union was at the height of both the Stalinist
purge and a wave of antifascist paranoia in response to the Anti-Comintern Pact thatJapan had concluded with Nazi Germany. Virtually all Japanese in the Soviet Union,
including Communist Party members and sympathizers, fell under suspicion ofespionage. As Pravda, the news organ of the Soviet Communist Party, warned in July
1937 (a month before Sano’s expulsion), Japanese residing in the Soviet Union—
generally, leftist intellectuals such as Sano—were all “potentially Japanese spies” that
the Japanese government planted in the country. Quote in Tetsuro Kato, “The JapaneseVictims of Stalinist Terror in the USSR,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 32, no.
1 (July 2000): 12. Some resident Japanese were shot to death, or “liquidated” in theparlance of the era, while others were sent to concentration camps or prisons, and stillothers, like Sano, were expelled. See Tetsuro Kato, Mosukuwa de Shukuseisareta
Nihonjin [The Japanese purged in Moscow] (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1994).
36 For an account of the espionage charges leveled against Smedley by Gen. MacArthur,see Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
chaps. 17–18. Price claims that Smedley was indeed guilty of the charges.
37 “The Sorge Spy Ring: A Case Study in International Espionage in the Far East,”report, Congressional Record Appendix, 81st Cong., 1st sess. (1949), vol. 95, pt. 12:
A707.
38 “Spy Charge Denied by Miss Smedley,” New York Times, February 11, 1949, 4;“Army Admits Spy Faux Pas: No Proof on Agnes Smedley,” New York Times, February
19, 1949, 6.
39 “Army Admits Spy Faux Pas,” 1.
40 “Officer Welcomes Suit on Spy Report: U.S. Intelligence Chief in Tokyo Waives

48

Etsuko Taketani

Immunity to Face Action by Agnes Smedley,” New York Times, February 22, 1949, 11;Charles A. Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1952), 247, 271.
41 Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy, 273–74.
42 “Willoughby Exhibit No. 40: Smedley and Associates: 1918–48,” document, in
Hearings on American Aspects of the Richard Sorge Spy Case (Based on Testimony of
Mitsusada Yoshikawa and Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby): Hearings before theCommittee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Second
Congress, First Session, August 9, 22, and 23, 1951 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1951), 1219, 1222–23.
43 Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 2: 4, 197.
44 Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy, 254–56, 298–99.
45 Ibid., 275.