Office of the Historian

894.24/845

Memorandum of Conversation, by the Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs (Hamilton)

[Washington,] February 16, 1940.

During the course of a call made at his request, Mr. Morishima, Counselor of the Japanese Embassy, referred again to the contract between the Universal Oil Products Company and the Japan Gasoline Company which had been mentioned in the Japanese Embassy’s note of January 672 and in this Government’s reply73 on the subject of moral embargoes. Mr. Morishima had also brought up this matter in his conversation with me on January 3074 and the Japanese Ambassador had brought up the matter with the Secretary on January 31.75

Mr. Morishima asked that we give special consideration to the question of this particular contract. He said that the Japan Gasoline Company had contracts with three other Japanese companies; that the Japan Gasoline Company found itself, as a result of the policy of this Government in discouraging the sale of technical processes for the production of high-test gasoline, in a very difficult financial situation; and that the Japan Gasoline Company would be satisfied temporarily with partial fulfillment of its contract with the Universal Oil Products Company.

I told Mr. Morishima that I would of course make record of what he had said but that I would ask him to refer to what the Secretary had said to the Japanese Ambassador on January 31. I said that I could offer him no encouragement whatsoever that favorable considerable [consideration?] could be given to his request. I said that the American Government had adopted a general policy which was clearly explained in this Government’s reply to the Japanese Embassy’s note of January 6; and that where someone had requested that an exception be made in a particular case the decision had uniformly been that it was not feasible to endeavor to make exceptions. Mr. Morishima kept pressing the matter and I reiterated that while I would of course make record of what he had said I could offer no encouragement in the matter.

M[axwell] M. H[amilton]
  1. Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. ii, p. 205.↩
  2. Ibid., p. 208.↩
  3. Memorandum of conversation missing from Department files.↩
  4. See memorandum by the Secretary of State, Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. ii, p. 53.↩