793.94/15450: Telegram
The Ambassador in Japan (Grew) to the Secretary of State
[Received November 1—12:54 p.m.]
567. 1. The meeting now taking place of the Prime Minister and Foreign, War, Navy and Finance Ministers acting as president and vice presidents of the Asia Board and General Yanagawa, director general of the board, has been called for the purpose of formulating “specific plans for the settlement of the China incident”. The press anticipates that the Asia Board will reaffirm previous Japanese declarations with regard to the general principles of policy, notably the Konoye statement of December 22, 1938,5 namely:
- (a)
- recognition by China of Manchukuo,
- (b)
- anti-Comintern agreement among Japan, China and Manchukuo which would provide for the continued stationing of Japanese troops in certain parts of China and the designation of Inner Mongolia and North China as “special [anti-Communist] areas”,
- (c)
- economic cooperation among the three countries which would include right of Japanese to reside and carry on trade freely in China.
2. The press hints very broadly nevertheless that the meeting today may not be productive of a complete program of both policy and action. So far as we can learn the Japanese are still as far as they have ever been from devising guarantees for the carrying out of the above listed peace terms which would be compatible with the demands of Chinese with any claim to respectability. The suggestion frequently made in various telegrams from Peiping and elsewhere in China that there are divided counsels among the Japanese military leaders in China with regard to the questions whether Wang Ching Wei should be set up as the head of a central government and whether the present Nanking and Peiping regimes should be continued is fully borne out by information recently obtained from an entirely reliable Japanese source.
3. According to our informant, the questions immediately above presented arose in a somewhat different form as early as the autumn [Page 311] of 1937 when the attack on Nanking from Shanghai was decided on by General Matsui. General Yanagawa, above mentioned, who commanded the detachment which landed at Hangchow Bay and later commanded the army which advanced along the south bank of the Yangtze, contended that Japan could not conquer and destroy Central China; he believed that the Nanking campaign was a mistake but urged that when Nanking was captured it should be reduced to ashes and the army withdrawn to Shanghai and later evacuated.
In his view not only did Japan’s future lie in North China, in which area she could safely entrench herself, but the occupation as well of the Yangtze basin and South China would be beyond the capacity of Japan to maintain for an indefinite period.
4. The question whether there should be set up a new central Chinese Government and the Peiping and Nanking local regimes suppressed thus stems out of the older problem above described. There is and has been much talk, of course, of setting up a strong and completely independent new government in China. If this were the prevailing thought there should have been no such delay as there has been in establishing the much talked of new Government under Wang Ching Wei. We incline very strongly therefore to accept as substantially true the statement of our informant that the repeated postponements in the creation of such new government, which would be headed by Wang or some other person, is due primarily to the inability of the Japanese to agree among themselves upon the area over which Japan is able to exercise overlordship. There is obviously some disagreement among the Japanese with regard to the acceptability of Wang, his determination to retain a large measure of independence from Japanese control and his desire to remove restrictions on Americans and other foreign rights being irreconcilable with extremist concepts of the “new order”, but this matter is secondary both in importance and in time.
5. Discussions in the press are of course couched in the most guarded language but when read in the light of the foregoing information they strongly suggest that the Asia Board will forthwith reaffirm the Konoye statement and will agree upon the establishment of a Central Government under Wang, but that it will have difficulty and need more time in reaching any decision with regard to the extension by such government of de facto authority over North China and to the character of the assistance which Japan will bind itself to give to that government in areas outside North China.
Repeated to Peiping, Peiping please repeat to Chungking.