Office of the Historian

793.94/8603: Telegram

The Ambassador in China (Johnson) to the Secretary of State

Nanking, April 28, 1937—4 p.m.
[Received April 29—8:55 a.m.]

184. Our 179, April 24, 10 a.m.

1.
Kawagoe sailed this morning from Shanghai for Japan.
2.
A responsible official of the Foreign Office stated today to an officer of the Embassy that the Foreign Office had for a long time been “negotiating” for abrogation of the Tangku Truce of May 31, 1933, but without success and before Kawagoe’s departure from Nanking had intimated to him “not in so many words but in a general way” that future Sino-Japanese discussions would be conditioned upon at least abolition of the East Hopei and North Chahar régimes and suppression of smuggling in North China (their existence being possible because of the Tangku Truce). He said that recently both Japanese and Chinese officers had been very cautious in approaching the question of the resumption of Sino-Japanese discussions looking to settlement of so-called fundamental issues and neither side wanted to take the initiative. The Foreign Office expected that developments arising out of the forthcoming April 30 elections and returns would occupy the Japanese Government for at least a month and Sino-Japanese discussions would not be reopened until after that period. He anticipated that when they were resumed they would consist in little more than informal talks looking to the discovery of a basis on which formal discussions might proceed. The Foreign Office believed that Sato was sincere in desiring to reorient Japan’s China policy along more moderate lines; claims that Japanese officials in China had come to be moderate in their views including Kodama (head of the recent Japanese Economic Mission), Kawagoe and Suma;87 all the opinions of these men could not prevail with Japan’s military reactionaries; he, accordingly, did not believe that there would be any real change in [Page 79] Japanese policy because the Japanese military would be unwilling ever to annul the Tangku Truce which gives them a buffer between Manchukuo and China Proper, a corridor to Mongolia, a base for activities such as the illicit narcotics traffic and the smuggling which menaces the Chinese Government’s fiscal security.
3.
Sent to the Department, by mail to Peiping, Tokyo.
Johnson
  1. Yakichiro Suma, Counselor of Embassy in China.↩