711.94/20663/9
Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. Joseph W. Ballantine
I called by appointment on Father Drought this afternoon. He told me that the situation had changed since he saw me in New York; that his Japanese friends were now working with the Japanese Ambassador; that the Japanese Ambassador would probably have ready by the evening of April 8 a draft proposal, which Father Drought would probably have an opportunity to see; and that before presenting the proposals officially the Japanese would want some intimation that the Japanese proposals would be substantially acceptable to this Government. He explained that following such intimation the Cabinet would act on the proposals and instruct Nomura to present them and that it was desired to act on this matter prior to Matsuoka’s reaching Tokyo, as it was feared that otherwise Matsuoka upon his return would create difficulties. Father Drought added that the Japanese Army and Navy were behind the proposals and that the only difficulties so far encountered were from the Japanese Foreign Office. If prompt action should be taken Matsuoka would be confronted with an accomplished fact and he would have to either go along with it or resign. Another course that might be followed would be to supersede Matsuoka prior to his return from Europe, but the Japanese would prefer to avoid such an alternative.
Father Drought told me that the Japanese were so fearful of a premature leak, which might lead to their assassination, that they would not be likely to discuss the plan with me at all, either now or at any time prior to Nomura’s presenting it officially. I replied that in any case my call on the Japanese today, as far as I was concerned, would be purely social.
Father Drought then telephoned to Wikawa and asked him to come in. Wikawa was very effusive in his greeting and congratulated me upon my appointment as Counselor at Peiping, of which he said he had learned from the Ambassador. Wikawa then took me to his quarters and introduced me to Colonel Iwakuro. Nishiyama, the Japanese Financial Attaché, was also present. Nishiyama appeared to have been drinking.
Colonel Iwakuro appeared to be a person of between forty and forty-five years of age. He has an attractive and vigorous personality. He did most of the talking. After a considerable amount of small talk, the Colonel abruptly remarked that he thought that a war between Japan and the United States would be a calamity, that it would be a prolonged affair lasting from three to five years, and that it would result in lowering of standards of living. I said that war nowadays [Page 128] is not profitable economically even to the victors. Iwakuro went on to say that he had been impressed during his trip across this country with the abundance which our people enjoyed of everything; he felt it was incumbent upon the capitalist class of the United States to make sacrifices so that peoples of other countries would have opportunity to improve their standards of living. I said that we would ourselves benefit from the improvement of standards of living elsewhere. At the same time I said that the American people could not be sympathetic with efforts by one nation to better itself at the expense of some other nation. This evoked protestations that Japan was not trying to subjugate and dominate China or close doors in China to third countries, except as necessitated temporarily by military exigencies. I asked how about Japan’s ousting of foreign commercial interests in Manchuria. Nishiyama admitted that the Japanese had made mistakes and had learned that the petroleum monopoly was a mistake. I pointed out the inconsistency between assertions that Japan intended to respect the principle of the open door and the economic bloc idea underlying the so-called “co-prosperity sphere in East Asia” which the Japanese are advocating. Iwakuro said that this was an idea which had been born out of developments elsewhere, such as the Ottawa Conference,79 but he agreed that Japan would stand to gain more from the adoption of the principle of equality of commercial opportunity than by the adoption of the bloc idea.
The above conversation was carried on in Japanese and on an amicable plane. The Japanese did not bring up the subject of their mission.
- Imperial Economic Conference held at Ottawa in 1932. For texts of agreements, see British and Foreign State Papers, vol. cxxxv, pp. 161 ff.↩