H. Alexander Smith Papers, Princeton University1
The Consultant to the Secretary (Dulles) to Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin
Dear Alex: At our Delegation meeting on August 1, you asked for a statement concerning the relationship of Article 2 of the draft Peace Treaty with Japan to the Yalta Agreements.
Article 2 of the Treaty neither flows from nor confirms the agreement at Yalta. If the Yalta Agreements are treated as void, Article 2 [Page 1241] would stand, for it reflects the Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 19452 whereby the United States, the United Kingdom and China set forth the Japanese surrender terms, which Japan accepted. This agreement, publicly arrived at, embodies the fundamental terms upon which SCAP has been operating for six years. Paragraph 8 of that agreement provides that Japanese sovereignty “shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine”. The Treaty confirms this paragraph. It leaves it, however, to other international processes to determine what becomes of the renounced territories, and the United States assumes no treaty commitments in these respects.
You also asked about the effect on Japan of losing these various territories, particularly with respect to the present and potential population pressure in that country.
In Sakhalin and the Kuriles the total Japanese population in 1940 was about 400,000, or one-half of one percent of the total. These areas, as parts of Japan, never sustained any substantial part of Japan’s population. The respective population figures were Sakhalin, 398,000; Kuriles, 11,500. The other territories which are to be renounced by Japan did not in pre-war times provide substantial outlets for Japan’s surplus population. Prior to the war when Japan had free rights of emigration to Korea, Manchuria and Formosa, the total cumulative number of Japanese who had come to live in those areas did not much exceed a million persons. Formosa, a naturally rich island with good climate which had been a Japanese colony for fifty years, had during that entire period accumulated a Japanese population of only about 350,000.
If there is any further information along these lines you desire, please let me know.
Sincerely yours,
- U.S. Senator from New Jersey, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Alternate Delegate of the United States to the San Francisco Peace Conference.↩
- For text of the Proclamation calling for the surrender of Japan, by the Heads of Government of China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, see Foreign Relations, 1945, The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), vol. ii, p. 1474.↩