Office of the Historian

761.93 Manchuria/168

Memorandum by the Assistant Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs (Ballantine) of a Conversation With the Counselor of the Japanese Embassy (Suma)

[Washington,] August 2, 1938.

Mr. Suma called at his own request to acquaint me confidentially with information he had received from his Government in regard to the situation on the Siberian-Manchurian border. Most of the information was a repetition of Japanese official communiqués which have already been reported in the press and by our Embassy at Tokyo. Mr. Suma showed me a map of the border region where the recent incidents have occurred and said that when the Japanese Ambassador at Moscow protested against the Russian occupation of Changkufeng the Russians produced a copy of a map which they said accompanied the Hunchun Treaty of 186819 and which showed that the disputed place was in Russian territory. Mr. Suma said further that in 1906 when a Russo-Japanese agreement was concluded20 Ambassador Motono had been furnished by the Russian Government with copies of maps defining the borders and that according to these maps the disputed place was in Manchuria. The map which Litvinoff showed to Ambassador Shigemitsu was not among the maps which had been furnished the Japanese Government in 1906.

I said that our information in regard to this situation was derived from official communiqués of the two sides issued in the press and that I had understood from these communiqués that the Japanese did not intend to take military measures to recover the disputed territory. Mr. Suma said that that was the case up to the time that certain Manchurian gendarmes were arrested by the Soviet authorities on the 30th which was the direct cause of the subsequent fighting. Mr. Suma said [Page 464] that according to latest reports Soviet airplanes had made incursions into Korean territory. They had gone as far as Rashin and had dropped bombs at the port of Yuki. Mr. Suma said that the Japanese Government was making every effort to reach a peaceful settlement and had reasonable hopes that such a settlement would be reached. He said that of course it was impossible to make any predictions but he was hopeful of a satisfactory outcome.

J[oseph] W. B[allantine]
  1. Variously reported as concluded in 1869, 1884, or 1886; extract printed in the Moscow News, August 8, taken from Pravda.↩
  2. For Russo-Japanese agreement of July 30, 1907, see British and Foreign State Papers, vol. ci, p. 462.↩