026 Foreign Relations/1357
The Ambassador in Japan (Grew) to the Secretary of State
[Received April 18.]
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the Department’s instruction no. 1445 of March 2, 1938, with regard to the attitude of the Japanese Government towards the policy of publishing Foreign Relations volumes approximately fifteen years after the date of the documents printed in the volumes. The Department desires that in my discretion I ascertain the views of the Japanese Government with regard to the possibility of issuing Foreign Relations volumes which will include documents of a date closer to current events than the fifteen-year period mentioned. Nevertheless the Department prefers that I refrain from making any approach to the Japanese Government on this matter at this time if I have reason to believe that instead of contributing to accomplishment of the desired purpose, such an approach would be likely to prompt the Japanese Government to insist upon a further widening of the present gap of fifteen years in respect to its documents.
In reply I regret to say that all evidence which has come to the Embassy indicates that the Japanese Government regards the period of fifteen years as too short an interval to justify the publication of some of the documents submitted to the Japanese Government by the Department, and there is no reason to believe that the attitude of the Government as expressed informally by an official of the Foreign Office [Page 982] and reported in paragraph 3 of my despatch no. 953 of September 5, 1934,17 has altered in a favorable direction. If our Government were now to seek to reduce the fifteen-year period I believe that in all probability the Japanese Government, when consulted, would express objection to the publication of individual documents in more cases than at present and that one of the important desiderata of the interested American public, including international law societies, professors, lawyers, publicists, and others interested in international affairs, namely that the documents published in Foreign Relations be as complete as possible, would be defeated. I think that such an approach to the Japanese officials as the Department suggests would be injudicious in that it might well result in the Japanese Foreign Office making use of the occasion to insist on widening the present gap rather than shortening it. This opinion is naturally speculative but we believe it to be sound.
I have read with interest the various documents enclosed with the Department’s instruction and am impressed, as indeed I always have been impressed, with the importance of rendering our Foreign Relations volumes as complete and as helpful as possible to the legal and academic world. The great improvement of these volumes in recent years is marked. To aim at earlier publication at the expense of completeness would, I think, be an unwise policy and I have little doubt that so far as the Japanese Government is concerned a reduction of the fifteen-year period—which has been characterized here as already too short an interval—would incur grave risk of impairing the value and purpose of the series.
Respectfully yours,
- Not printed.↩