894.51/390
Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State (Castle)
The French Ambassador called to show me a telegram from his Government quoting a report published in The Chicago Tribune that France and Japan were negotiating a secret alliance and that France [Page 360] was going to advance to Japan 500,000,000 francs. He said he thought it was hardly worth while even to bother me with the telegram, since we would realize that there is no truth whatever in the story, but that as his Government had told him to deny it flatly, he must do so.
The Ambassador said the only financial negotiations that he knew of were those which had been carried on by M. Massenet, who went to Japan and Manchuria for a very unimportant bank to see what could be done to save the French interests in the Chinese Eastern Railroad. I told the Ambassador that the Secretary had misunderstood him when he discussed Massenet’s visit to say that Massenet represented the French Government; he said he hoped I would have this corrected immediately as Massenet had no connection whatever with the French Government; he said that his talk with Massenet had very much discouraged him because Massenet had so strongly pointed out the danger of a very serious social crisis in Japan which might take a communistic angle and might take a Fascisti angle, with socialism intermixed. In any case, Massenet felt that the immediate future of Japan was in a very perilous state; he also made the report that Japanese troubles in Manchuria could only grow worse for the reason that certainly not more than one per cent of the people in Manchuria had any use for Japan and that possibly even that one per cent was secretly opposed to Japanese domination. The reason for this, according to Massenet, is that the Chinese are ignored and made fun of by the Japanese officials; Massenet spoke of one instance where he was interviewing one of the principal Chinese leaders of Manchukuo when the young Japanese officer with him said “There is not much use talking to these people, they are all fools”, in the hearing of the official. The Ambassador pointed out that Japan, more than any country in the world, was divided between men of real intelligence, who now have no power, and the army, which, although it has some excellent people at the head, is dominated by under officers who are as rotten a crowd as it is possible to imagine; he said that, in any country underlings with a little power are apt to be overbearing, but that this was abnormally true in the case of Japan.
The Ambassador brought up the subject of the Lytton Report, which he said he had just read in its entirety; he feels that the recommendations in the Report are untenable because they would never work; he says that what he fears is that the League, dominated by the small nations, will simply censure Japan for all that it has done, without making any constructive suggestions; that this will endanger the position of the great powers since the small powers which will do the censuring will have no responsibility and that it will result merely in hastening the downfall of Japan. With all that Japan has done, which M. Claudel disapproves as much as any of us, he feels that Japan still [Page 361] remains the only link the western nations have with the Orient and that it would be a world disaster to have Japan made impotent, perhaps develop into a communistic state and thus open the road for propaganda; he says he is honestly attached to all the good there is in Japan and does not want to see the rest of the world assist in the destruction of that good, although he admits that he has himself no constructive suggestion to make. He thinks that the only course is to refuse to have any dealings with Manchukuo and then wait patiently to see how the matter will work out.