Be careful of what you send while learning CW.

 14.313 was considered the 20 meter tuning channel for quite a while. I'll get into this later in another post. For a while it was the 20 meter dumping ground. Want to tune your rig on 20 meters with a manual tuner? Take it to 14.313. Practice CW? Go to 14.313.

Anyway, briefly there was an informal CW practice net that went there and I was learning CW at the time. (CW is use it or lose it. I'd have to start over again and was never very good at it to begin with.)

There were a number of standard messages sent back and forth, carefully chosen because they used almost all of the letters in the alphabet. 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs' is one because it uses all 26 letters.

Anyway, some chowderhead got tired of the same old same old and had a bright idea.

'Corporal Takaki Yakazumi, IJA SB Hill 883 New Guinea. I am getting old. Send Sake and comfort girl. Long live the Emperor.' came over 14.313 in slow newbie CW. 

While I didn't get all of it, I could easily fill in the patches as to what he had sent. I admit I laughed like hell. Then I wondered if anyone else had heard it and simply forgot about it.

Sure enough, propagation into Japan that night was good and at least two Japanese hams were reported to have heard it and somebody reported it to the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. The Japanese military takes that kind of thing quite seriously. For thirty years after the war holdouts would appear that had hid out. In the 50s there were clashes and well into the 60s and early 70s they occasionally emerged.

It got to be a Hollywood joke of sorts and even Gilligans Island had an episode where a pair if Japanese holdouts visited them in a midget submarine.

While the possibility of some 90 year old guy living in a cave on a Pacific island was pretty damned remote, it had to be investigated. Stranger thing have happened.

I was unaware of what happened in Japan until a couple of emails showed up in my inbox. It explained what happened and asked me to shoot an email explaining what happened to a pair of Japanese hams. It contained their email addresses and I simply did what was asked.

I guess the emails were forwarded to the JSDF headquarters because the whole thing died immediately.

Needless to say, the telling and retelling of that simple story grew to the point where the JSDF was going to send three battalions out to look for the guy and Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera had been dispatched to New Guinea to cover the horror show of about 2500 angry Japanese soldiers combing through the New Guinea jungles tripping and stumbling over all the crap their grandfathers had left there.

Some wag said he wanted to see Katie get bitten on the butt by a pie plate sized spider and see Geraldo get stuck with another 'Al Capone's vault' type episode. I see his point because nobody looks as good as Geraldo does with egg on his face.