No Danger

The practices of peace returned to Hawaii last week. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. military authorities in Hawaii had no scruples about interning 878 Japanese aliens and Jisho Yamazaki. Yamazaki was a priest of the Buddhist Soto cult, which played a great part in whipping up Jap militarism.

After V-J day, Yamazaki was released. Promptly, he loosed a torrent of postcards, letters, and speeches. The Japanese had won the war, he claimed. He hoped to guide the Japanese in Hawaii, which, he said, the Jap fleet was "watching," back into the path of Soto righteousness. He exhorted: "You should be, like Lord Buddha, strong and ruling the universe as the most superior ones."*

Hawaii's police just as promptly haled him into court, had him indicted for violation of the 1919 territorial "disloyalty" act.

But last week Circuit Court Judge John Albert Matthewman dismissed the charges. The disloyalty provisions of the act were invalid, he decided, since they encroached on the prerogative of the U.S. Congress. It was "fundamentally true" that the right of free speech is subject to the "proper exercise of police power," but only when there is "clear and present danger" of a breach of the peace.

Jisho Yamazaki could go on proclaiming that Japan had won the war, that the Jap fleet still lurked below the horizon--as long as such talk presented no "clear and present danger" to Hawaii's peace of mind.

* In Japan last week, Buddhists joined with representatives of other Japanese religions at the "All-Japan Religious Peace Conference" to announce: "We condemn ourselves for our guilt and humbly confess our faults before all the peoples of the world and pledge ourselves to make a new start. . . ."

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