390.1115A/866: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Minister in Switzerland (Harrison)
1499. American interests—Japan. Your 2589, June 9. Following for Grew: Department appreciates the humanitarian motives governing its representatives and the United States nationals in Japan who volunteer to give up such precedence as might be extended them on account of their official rank or on other grounds and wish to see women and children placed in the better accommodations on the vessel.
In accommodating on exchange vessels the enemy diplomatic missions and non-official nationals leaving the United States this Government has not consulted the Chiefs of departing missions but has assigned definite blocks of space to separate nationality groups and has allocated space within those blocks by order of priority allowing the individuals on reaching the vessel to adjust space among themselves if they wished. It appears that in Japan the allocation of space is being left by the Japanese Foreign Office to the representatives of the protecting powers and Department feels that these representatives should be allowed freely to allocate space in consultation with each other and in accordance with their best judgment. If any of the Department’s officers or any of the other United States men receive under such allocation quarters more comfortable than any United States women and children the former are, of course, at liberty to surrender their quarters to women or children if they so desire. The Department relies upon your tact to avoid any dispute over allocation of space on the vessel particularly in that the entire basis of the negotiation is that all the American states whose representatives and nationals are being repatriated have entered into this arrangement on a basis of absolute equality. Department particularly desires that the representatives of the other American states be not put in a position to feel that the United States representatives have insisted upon their taking accommodations inferior to those to which they might normally be entitled.