Abstract
The purpose of this article is to reposition the Kawagoe Shigeru-Zhanggun Conference of 1936 in the history of diplomacy by focusing on the details of the negotiations held during the latter half of that year, in order to examine their relationship to the China policy drafted by Foreign Minister Arita Hachiro at that time and subsequent diplomacy with China under the Hayashi Senjuro Cabinet. This study also aims to redefine the role of local diplomats in the history of Japanese and Chinese foreign relations, in an attempt to describe a multidimensional image of diplomatic negotiations not centered around the Foreign Minister or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In light of the research to date, the author fully examines and utilizes the heretofore unread diplomatic telegrams related to the preliminary and clerical preparations for the Kawagoe-Zhanggun Conference and finds that the talks, and the Arita Policy Initiative that served as its foundation, can be defined as an extension of the broader policy toward China that had been in place since the foreign ministership of Koki Hirota. However, both of these initiatives imply a modification of Hirota's “Three Principles” in terms of content and continuity and in terms of the appearance of centralization of China policy within the military's embrace.
In reality, however, the Arita Initiative was effectively overturned by Kawagoe and other local diplomats from the midpoint of the negotiations, and “independent diplomacy”, which included concessions on the North China and Anti-Communist issues emphasized by Arita, was developed against his will. This led to a temporary break in the stagnation marking the negotiations, and as a result, a concession line was formed that would serve as the basis for a subsequent appeasement line toward China by Army Chief of Staff Ishihara Kanji and Foreign Minister Sato Naotake. In this sense, it became clear that Ishihara's conception of China and Sato's “peace and harmony” diplomacy were also part of the process of policy change toward China, with the Conference as the turning point.
The structural development of the process of policy change toward China during this period can be understood as the abandonment of the Foreign Ministry's political maneuvering line, which attempted to centralize diplomatic relations with China under the control of the army following the “failure” of the Conference, and a transformation into a line of economic and cultural maneuvering that would cause less friction between Japan and China and was domestically well grounded.
