日華事変におけるピース・フィーラー

日本外交の非正式チャンネル

抄録

The host of Japanese “peace-feelers” who tried to contact the Chinese side in order to bring about peace between the two warring nations in the period 1937-1941 may be regarded as “informal contact-makers” in the context of state-to-state negotiations. Depending on whether contact-makers have official credentials or not and whether their contacts are pre-announced (namely, announced to the public in advance) or not, informal contact-makers are of three types: those with unofficial capacity seeking pre-announced contacts; those with official capacity seeking secret contacts; and those with unofficial capacity seeking secret contacts.
A detailed analysis of the binational contacts of this period reveals that no peace-feelers belonged to the first type mentioned above, while there were some peace-feelers such as diplomats who, in their official capacity, sought secret contacts. Apart from those diplomats who participated in the peace efforts, however, it is difficult to identify other peace-feelers who could belong to this second type, mainly because of the ambiguity of the definition of “official capacity.”
The third type of informal contact-makers became active after Japan denied the the legitimacy of the Chinese Nationalist government in January 1938, thus prompting a breaking off of relations. Peace-feelers of this kind in this study included (1) a diplomat who contacted the Chinese at his discretion without advance official approval (2) military officers who without official credentials joined the search for peace; and, most significantly, (3) those private individuals who had no official capacity but who voluntarily sought opportunities for peace, utilizing their own personal ties with the Chinese and other influentials. Typically, they were Matsumoto Shigeharu (a journalist working in Shanghai for Domei News Agency and one of the entourage of Konoe Funimaro), Kayano Nagatomo (a “comrade” of the Chinese Revolution and a friend of Sun Yat-sen), and Nishi Yoshiaki (an official of the South Manchurian Railway Co.).
The active presence of peace-feelers may be explained by the close, if not friendly, historical contacts between the two peoples and also by the relatively short distance between the two countries and the existence of neutral zones such as Hong Kong, Macao, and the Settlements in Shanghai, which made it easy for the informal contact-makers to operate. Another contributing factor may be the diffuseness of the Japanese (and perhaps Chinese, too) policy-making structures.