“Free Japan” in World War Two London

Re-reading Julian Maclaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties it jogged my memory that he mentions the Free Japanese movement in London. I know next to nothing about the Free Japanese movement in World War Two and so can echo the words of Dylan Thomas (who Maclaren-Ross was working with at the time) – “he had heard of Free French, Free Poles, Free Dutch, Free Italians and if not actually Free Germans at any rate Free German-speaking people, but never, no never Free Japanese.” Me neither (though I could add the Shanghai chapter of the Free Austrians to the list, about who I blogged here). So, a bit of a hunt….

So here’s how they crop up:

• It’s 1943 and Maclaren-Ross has wangled a job out of the forces and with Strand Films as a scriptwriter on propaganda productions;
• Working at Strand with him is the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas;
• Strand was based at No.1 Golden Square in Soho (picture of that building, now Bauer Media, as it is today below) – in the same building Maclaren-Ross and Thomas notice a sign for “Free-Japanese Lampshades”;
• Certainly there had been Japanese lampshade manufacturers in London, not that far away from Golden Square, in London’s pre-war “Little Tokyo” of Denmark Street (see Keiko Itoh’s The Japanese Community in Pre-War Britain for more on that community, now mostly forgotten) but they all shut down by 1941.
• According to Itoh, above, Japanese were all either repatriated or interned by 1943.

I’m afraid I know little about the Free Japanese beyond a Wikipedia entry that deals with Japanese Communist Party members who were in Yenan with the Chinese communists during the war. However, no references (including in Itoh’s book) to London and Free Japanese, except Messrs Maclaren-Ross and Thomas.

Anyone know anything?