File No. 895.00/532.
The American Chargé d’Affaires to the Secretary of State.
Tokyo, November 29, 1910.
Sir: I have the honor to inform you that, at the request of the acting minister for foreign affairs, I called at the foreign office this afternoon. Mr. Ishii handed me a note (No. 71), copies of which are inclosed herewith, replying to the ambassador’s note of October 14 regarding change of venue in cases affecting Americans in Korea. Mr. Ishii said that he had asked me to come to see him so as to explain more fully why only criminal cases were mentioned in the-decree issued by the governor general of Chosen. He pointed out that, as only criminal cases were mentioned in Mr. O’Brien’s note, the ministry had considered it unnecessary to refer to other cases, more especially since in civil matters it was always possible for both parties at interest to come to an amicable agreement regarding change of venue. He further said that, as Mr. O’Brien had, in the note above referred to, only mentioned this one matter and had passed over without comment all the other points contained in Count Komura’s confidential note No. 12 of October 6, he therefore took it for granted that the United States had fully approved of all the answers upon which the ambassador had not commented.
I said in reply that Mr. O’Brien had merely asked for information upon certain points under instructions from the Department, and that when the reply came he had neither approved it nor disapproved, but had referred the whole matter to the Department of State and had, at the same time, without having heard from the Department, taken up upon his own initiative one point which had seemed to him to require further elucidation.
It is obvious that the decree of the governor general as now promulgated leaves the whole question of change of venue to his discretion and does not make it mandatory upon the judicial authorities of Chosen, as was Mr. O’Brien’s idea. Moreover, this matter of change of venue is, after all, a minor one compared with the general question of whether extraterritoriality in Korea shall or shall not be abolished in so far as regards Americans. I do not understand that the ambassador in sending his note of October 14, to which the inclosed communication is a reply, meant to infer that, should the Japanese Government give a satisfactory answer, the whole question of consular jurisdiction might be regarded as ended.
In all my conversations with Mr. Ishii and others since the treaty of annexation was published, I have consistently made the point that American consular jurisdiction was not abolished and could not be so until some definite action to that end had been taken by the Government of the United States.
I have, etc.,