711.94/1741: Telegram
The Ambassador in Japan (Grew) to the Secretary of State
[Received October 6—9:23 a.m.]
949. 1. The Foreign Minister’s two hour and a quarter talk with me yesterday at his invitation was informal and off the record except for three subjects reported in separate telegrams.52 Such discourses are difficult to chronicle because the Minister’s volubility flows on by the hour with little or no punctuation but from time to time he brings up points of marked interest. The talk yesterday was as usual about 95 percent Matsuoka and 5 percent Grew, because such monologues can be broken only by forceful intrusion.
2. The Minister’s main thesis was that the world situation today is the logical result of the clash between the machine age and tradition and the only heated words in the colloquy came from me when Mr. Matsuoka tried to justify national expansion, especially that of Germany, by war, on the ground of imperative necessity. I said that I had personally known the old Germany as a happy, contented prosperous and progressive country within its own boundaries and that it was utterly preposterous to condone on the ground of necessity the action of Germany’s present leaders in grinding her weaker neighbors into the dust to satisfy the megalomaniac ambitions of those leaders. As for Japan I personally appreciated her economic needs. It was not the reasonable urge of these needs that had brought Japan’s relations with the United States to such a deplorable pass but the methods of force employed in following that urge instead of by the methods envisaged in Mr. Hull’s logical and practical plans for solving economic troubles by orderly processes.
2. [3.] Mr. Matsuoka said that after a long period of retirement from public affairs and after having thrice refused posts in the last [Page 423] Konoye Cabinet, his intensive pondering on the sorry state of his country had finally led him to urge Prince Konoye again to emerge as the only individual who would rescue Japan from impending chaos and revolution; that the Prime Minister was now a very different person from the vacillating politician of the earlier Konoye Cabinet, and that Prince Konoye was now inflexibly determined to save the country which even now is threatened with revolution. I asked the Minister what nature of revolution he feared to which he replied: “Political, economic and social ‘revolution’, the danger of which,” Mr. Matsuoka said, “is by no means past.” He dwelt at length on the weakness and vacillation of former Foreign Ministers.
[4.] The Minister said that now that the tripartite alliance53 was consummated and off of his mind he intended to get to work immediately on the accumulation of American complaints which I had presented to him and to do everything in his power to clear them up. When he took office it was made a sine qua non that he was going to direct the foreign relations of Japan and he did not propose to be dictated to by the military, especially the younger hot-headed officers.
5. Mr. Matsuoka in the course of his talk said that Japan would welcome the cooperation of other nations in the development of the new order in East Asia and had no intention of driving out their interests. I immediately took him up on this point which I said I was delighted to hear, but that in fact, as I had clearly indicated in former talks, Japan had already driven out many legitimate American interests built up through generations and was busily engaged in completing the sweep. The Minister replied as usual that these questions would be solved as soon as Chiang Kai-shek had been defeated and the hostilities in China terminated and, as usual, he appealed to the American Government to cease aiding Chiang. I repeated, as usual, the position of the United States on that issue.
6. Just as I was on the point of departure, Mr. Matsuoka presented an earnest plea that I should urge my Government not to impose further embargoes against Japan. “They would not seriously handicap us”, he said, “but they would intensely anger the Japanese people” and he added that the thought of war with the United States made him shudder. As to the immediate as contrasted with the long-term effect of such embargoes, I believe Mr. Matsuoka is right.
Sent to the Department; code text to Shanghai; by air mail for Chungking.
- See telegram No. 948, October 5, 10 p.m., Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. ii, p. 171; telegrams No. 951, October 6, 5 p.m., and No. 947, October 5, 9 p.m., not printed.↩
- Signed at Berlin, September 27, 1940; for summary of pact, see Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. ii, p. 165.↩