Several years ago a Japanese named T. Tahara came to Panama as the traveling representative of a newly organized company, the Official Japanese Association of Importers and Exporters for Latin America, and established headquarters in the offices of the Boyd Bros. shipping agency in Panama.
Nelson Rounsevell, publisher of the _Panama American_, who has fought Japanese colonization in Canal areas, printed a story that this big businessman got very little mail, made no efforts to establish business contacts and, in talking with the few businessmen he met socially, showed a complete lack of knowledge about business. Tahara was talked about and orders promptly came through for him to return to Japan.
This was in 1936. Half a year later, a suave Japanese named Takahiro Wakabayashi appeared in Panama as the representative of the Federation of Japanese Importers and Exporters, the same organization under a slightly changed name. Wakabayashi checked into the cool and spacious Hotel Tivoli, run by the United States Government on Canal Zone territory and, protected by the guardian wings of the somewhat sleepy American Eagle, washed up and made a beeline for the Boyd Bros. office, where he was closeted with the general manager for over an hour.
Wakabayashi's business interests ranged from taking pictures of the Canal in specially chartered planes, to negotiating for manganese deposits and attempting to establish an "experimental station to grow cotton in Costa Rica."
The big manganese-and-cotton-photographer man fluttered all over Central and South America, always with his camera. One week he was in San José, Costa Rica; the next he made a hurried special flight to Bogotá, Colombia (November 12, 1937); then back to Panama and Costa Rica. He finally got permission from Costa Rica to establish his experimental station.
In obtaining that concession he was aided by Giuseppe Sotanis, an Italian gentleman wearing the fascist insignia in the lapel of his coat, whom he met at the Gran Hotel in San José. Sotanis, a former Italian artillery officer, is a nattily dressed, slender man in his early forties who apparently does nothing in San José except study his immaculate finger nails, drink Scotch-and-sodas, collect stamps and vanish every few months only to reappear again, still studying his immaculate finger nails. It was Sotanis who arranged for Nicaragua to get the shipment of arms and munitions which I mentioned earlier.