What happens
The episode traces Japan's long, patient campaign to dominate Singapore and the Pacific before the war. Japanese businessmen, carpenters and photographers quietly gather maps, photographs and naval information while building trade networks across the region. A Japanese agent and a boatload of suspected spies are caught, and local leaders are courted with trips to Japan. The Pacific Story series presents the program as a wartime public service, broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company in 1945. The episode continues as Japan's invasion turns from quiet preparation into open conquest.
Singapore and the surrounding Malayan and Dutch East Indies region, Formosa and Tokyo, 1938 to 1941, with a closing account of a Japanese prison camp.
Characters: Ikutaro Ogawa, Mr. Tomohashi, Mr. Nico, Corporal Willard E. Hall
Listen for: Listen for the carpenter Ogawa's photographs of the Pacific Hills gap and the arrest of the spy Tomohashi at the Singapore harbor, when a 'lost' envelope of charts is revealed.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.