The aim of this article is to bring to light the proceedings concerning the Baltic problem at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919-1920. This article will focus on the case of Estonia. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania proclaimed their independence from former Tsarist Russia in 1918 and then each provisional government started diplomatic initiatives to gain de jure recognition from the Allied and Associated Powers. The Baltic nations insisted upon their right to national self-determination, something which both the American President, Woodrow Wilson and the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin had already asserted during the war. Therefore, the Baltic nations were expecting the Powers to respect their claims.
The Peace Conference was held in January 1919. However, the Baltic states were not permitted to attend. There were two important issues discussed: one, the settlement with Germany and secondly, the solution to the Russian revolution. The Powers' only interest was how to overthrow the Bolshevik régime and create a democratic and united Russia, so they neglected the demands of small nations like the Baltic states. Great Britain demonstrated some sympathy with the causes of these smaller nations whereas the United States remained intransigent. In May anti-Bolshevik military forces led by Admiral Kolchak advanced against Central Russia, with the Powers anticipating his military success. Kolchak and the Conference agreed to give autonomy to the Baltic nations, but, of course, they repulsed such dealings. Soon Kolchak was defeated by the Red Army, next General Yudenich appeared in Estonia, preparing to capture Petrograd with the support of the Powers. Britain put particular pressure on Yudenich and Estonia to cooperate with each other in military operations in exchange for recognition. Estonia rejected those dealings again and Yudenich also disappeared shortly afterwards.
By now the Baltic peoples evidently realized that the Conference had no intention to recognize the independence of the three nations. They were disappointed in the course of events at Paris, and therefore turned their eyes toward Moscow which was another birthplace of the theory of national self-determination. Soviet Russia and the Baltic states entered peace negotiations in September, naturally it was opposed by the Powers. In spite of their interference, a peace treaty was concluded between Estonia and Russia at Tartu in February 1920, and then the other two Baltic states followed. At Paris the Powers could not help admitting their failure to the solution to the Russian and Baltic problems. Even when the Conference closed in January 1920, they never permitted Baltic independence. All three Baltic states finally got de jure recognition at the end of 1922, not by the Peace Conference but by each Power seperately; nevertheless those small nations succeeded in maintaining their independence during the interwar period.

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Korea lost her independence because of the Japanese annexation of her in 1910 and the Japanese Military rule followed. But Korean dissatisfaction to Japanese rule went to the limit when the situational fluctuations of international politics like World War I, Russian Revolution and advocation of New Diplomacy by the United States President, Woodrow Wilson affected colonial Korea. So Korean independence demonstrators in many regions tried to regain her independence and March First Movement broke out in 1919 in Korea at the opening of the Paris Peace Conference. Especially, Korean expectations toward the United States became high because many Koreans thought that as the actual head of international society the United States would apply the Self-Determination Principle advocated by Wilson to Korea. But in spite of several frictions with Japan, the Wilson Administration was negative to the change of the status quo in Korea because they thought that the Korean problem had been solved by the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 and that they had little interest in Korea and they wanted no more friction with Japan. This meant that the severe “reality” was superior to the “ideal” advocated then in international politics.
As the exile government, the Korean Provisional Government was formed and united in Shanghai, China, in 1919. But it began to split into the hard-line faction and the diplomatic faction because of differences of methodology to the independence of Korea. Under the circumstances, the Washington Disarmament Conference was held for stabilization of the Navy problem and the Far Eastern and Pacific problems from November 12, 1921 to February 6, 1922. And again, Korean independence demonstrators, like Syngman Rhee, the President of the Korean Provisional Government and later the First President of the present Republic of Korea, appealed to the Conference, but they were ignored again. But the most numerous fifty-two Koreans, like Kyu-sic Kim, the delegate for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, attended at the First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East held in Moscow by the Communist International from January 21, 1922 to February 2, 1922. Compared with the Washington Conference, the Congress showed sympathy for the situation in Korea, so that socialism strongly penetrated into the Korean independence movement. This gave subtle influences to the Korean situations after World War II.

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After World War I, the United States emerged as a major world power in international relations. During the 1920s, American culture also gained influence around the world, ranging from jazz music to motion pictures. In particular the U. S. film industry dominated the international film trade, and Hollywood movies became the most visible outpost of American culture overseas, bringing the images of American life directly to the masses of foreign audiences. This article explores the relationships between culture and U. S. foreign relations by examining how the U. S. film industry approached world film markets and conceptualized the cultural roles of its products overseas in the 1920s.
The wartime growth of Hollywood as a multinational culture industry led to a number of new problems in the early 1920s. There was a series of economic conflicts between major studios (producer-distributors) and small, independent exhibitors. The U. S. film industry also encountered cultural conflicts at home and abroad. On the domestrc front Hollywood movies were seen as the menacing symbol of urban mass culture and faced increasing demands for public censorship in many states. Overseas, they were seen as the main agent of Americanization and faced the growing dangers of official censorship and import regulation in many countries. In response, the U. S. film industry organized a powerful trade association that represented a system of industrial self-regulation sanctioned by the U. S. government and the structure of business-government collaboration was used to solve both the national and foreign problems, thereby showing the connections between the American search for order at home and abroad in the 1920s.
Moreover, the discourse of Hollywood movies also showed important connections between domestic and world order in U. S. foreign cultural relations. It defined American pictures as the new medium to showcase and advertise U. S. products and promote consumer culture not only at home but also around the world. In a broader sense, the same discourse presented Hollywood movies as the main vehicle for Americanization of the world. The new culture industry would become a driving force of international peace, prosperity, and progress by spreading a universal, democratic American value system and linking peoples and nations together in a tight web of cultural interdependence. However, the universalist discourse of the American impact abroad was embedded within a much more inclusive network of nationalist beliefs in the superiority of American culture and models. As the product of domestic traditions and values, Hollywood movies were far from being universal in their representations of foreign peoples and cultures, thereby often causing a wave of anti-Americanism against their cultural inroads abroad in the interwar years.

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The general evaluation of the Beijing government's treaty revision diplomacy is not high because the Beijing Special Tariff Conference from 1925 to 1926 resulted in a barren result. However, the fact is that the Beijing government built an important cornerstone towards the revision of unequal treaties. It was not accidental that political estrangement was caused between Japan, America, and Britain; and that a better environment for Chinese treaty revision was created.
What has been emphasized on this point conventionally was the materialization of the Kellogg-Johnson line as a pro-Chinese line. This should be, at least partly, interpreted as the result of Chinese treaty revision diplomacy. In particular, the formation of the pro-Chinese line in the Department of State was, to a large extent, the response to the plan which the Beijing government instigated. Chinese Foreign Minister Shen Ruilin esteemed relationships with America to ensure diplomatic support from Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, while the activity of Chinese Minister to America Alfred Sze satisfied the expectation of the Beijing government Foreign Ministry. Considering the political process of the Paris Peace Conference and the Washington Conference, that situation was rather an exceptional success in Chinese diplomacy history.
British diplomacy, whose mediation between America and Japan had been effective in the Paris Peace Conference and the Washington Conference in the past, did not work this time. This, again, was the result of what the Beijing government had planned. The Chinese side differentiated their attitude towards Britain from their policy towards America and Japan, because of the fact that Britain had shown the severest attitude at the beginning. When British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs J. Austen Chamberlain approached America in order to convert his previous policy, Japanese Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijuro's stiffened economism was revealed. In this sense, the isolation of Shidehara diplomacy could be understood in context as a result of Chinese treaty revision diplomacy towards America and Britain.

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Research since the 1980s shed new light on the deep involvement of Japan in opium cultivation and narcotic production in China and Taiwan until 1945. These historical facts were somewhat puzzling to the Japanese general public, because it was widely known that mainly Britain gained enormous profits by selling Indian opium into China. When and why did the change occur? In order to answer the question, this paper examines the activities of Japan and Britain at the Opium Advisory Committee of the League of Nations during the period from 1920 to 1926.
The Japanese pharmaceutical industry started to develop during the First World War when the western powers temporarily retreated from East Asia. Morphine production also began around 1917. Section 1 of this article deals with the establishment of the Opium Advisory Committee and issues discussed at its initial meetings. Britain severely criticized Japan for refining morphine in Formosa and smuggling the products into northern China. Some Japanese, however, found Britain's criticism unfair, because India was still continuing the cultivation and export of opium and British colonies in South East Asia gained profits from the government opium monopoly. Especially, the Straits Settlement obtained more than half of its revenue through the opium monopoly.
Section 2 explains the participation of the United States in the Opium Advisory Committee and the invitation of the International Opium Conference at Geneva in 1924-25. Section 3 examines the arguments at the Geneva Conference. The point raised by the Japanese representative, Sugimura Yotaro, was whether the international rules decided by the powers led by Britain were universally fair and just. As the United States also believed that the greatest problem was the production of opium in India and the meetings were held open to the public, the delegates of Britain and the Empire were placed in an awkward position through the Conference. The embarrassing situation made Britain reconsider the opium policies of the Empire in 1925-26.
Section 4 analyzes why Japan, unlike Britain, failed to change her opium policy and came to be entangled in the problem more and more gravely. The objective of Japan in the late 1920s was to develop the Japanese pharmaceutical industry further. As the problem of opium smoking and drug abuse was not recognized in Japan then, most people were not interested in the issue of illicit traffic in narcotics at all. There were no religious or voluntary organizations which grappled with the problem earnestly. The press coverage was far from being thorough. As a result, the debates at the Opium Advisory Committee were hardly known. Only a limited number of people realized that humanitarian records might seriously damage national prestige in the future.

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Naval questions were one of the major issues at the heart of Anglo-American relations of the interwar years. Although eclipsed by the Washington Conference of 1921-22 and the London Naval Conference of 1930, the Geneva Naval Conference of 1927 was ‘one of the most dramatically unsuccessful international gatherings of the twentieth century.’ Its breakdown marked the beginning of the most strained period of Anglo-American relations of the interwar years, which reached its nadir the following year with the Anglo-French Naval Compromise incident.
The Washington Conference of 1921-22 was an unprecedented success in the field of limitation of naval armaments. The Five Power Treaty established the famous 5-5-3 ratio in the strengths of capital ships between Britain, the United States and Japan, the three major naval powers at the time. Contrary to common belief, however, it did not grant the US Navy parity with the Royal Navy in real terms. The agreement only specified that the two navies should reach parity in the category of capital ships over a period of twenty years. The Royal Navy thus retained superiority in this category as well as keeping her naval bases, second-to-none merchant fleets and considerable predominance in cruisers.
After the Washington Conference the Americans sought to extend the Washington ratio to auxiliary vessels, a category not covered by the Treaty, establishing parity with the British in all naval ships. The British, meanwhile, desired to have their superiority in cruisers recognised by other Powers, specifically the United States, the only country financially capable of outbuilding Britain. To protect her world-wide trade routes and communication with imperial outposts, the Royal Navy deemed it necessary to possess seventy cruisers. The US Navy, on the other hand, did not specify figures but calculated its needs relative to the British total, for reasons as much political as strategic. These two conflicting agendas clashed in Geneva in 1927 and led to the stalemate, since the Americans did not accept anything less than ‘a navy second to none’, while the British refused to acknowledge that their strategic needs would be satisfied by what the Americans deemed sufficient. For them there could ‘really be no parity between a Power whose Navy is its life and a Power whose Navy is only for prestige’.
Three years later the London Naval Conference of 1930 finally resolved the issue, which had plagued Anglo-American relations throughout the 1920s. By focusing on naval questions this paper examines a facet of Anglo-American relations in the interwar years which was characterised by mistrust and conflicting interests.

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When Japan announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, it was assumed that Japan might lose its mandate over the former German Pacific islands. In the event, neither the League nor the Powers ever raised the question of Japan's right to retain the mandate, and Japan continued to hold the mandate after its definite departure from the League in 1935.
From a pure interpretation of the League Covenant, the only condition of being a mandatory was that it must be a suitable advanced nation. While the legitimacy of Japanese military activities in Manchuria was doubtful, the mandated islands were developing constantly under Japanese rule. Then, the only possibility of depriving Japan of the mandate was the finding of violation of the terms of the mandate, which might lead the way to cancellation of the mandate. However, without a proper inspection system, alleged violation of the non-fortification provision could not be proved.
Nevertheless, as the Japanese case touched on the basic principles of the mandate system, some quarters in the League felt that the Council should take official cognizance of a change in the legal situation of the mandate consequent on Japan's withdrawal: while the League confirmed Japan's retention of the mandated islands, it should re-assert the mandate principle and the authority of the League on the matter. However, this course was eventually abandoned due to the disapproval of the Powers. It was also feared that such a procedure would constitute a confirmation of the legal theory that a state withdrawing from the League had the right to maintain a mandate. Such a precedent might limit the action of the League in the future when the League might desire to cancel a mandate of a withdrawing state. By allowing the Japanese mandate to continue as if nothing had happened, there was the implication that Japan had the right to hold the mandate, but not necessarily an unqualified one.
As regards the sovereignty over the mandated territory, many questioned whether the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (hereinafter PAAP) held the ultimate power to dispose of the mandate. Nevertheless, the PAAP sovereignty theory was a useful concept to accommodate the needs of the mandatory Powers. It helped to limit the jurisdiction of the League on their mandated territories and to weaken Germany's claim to its lost colonies. For this reason it was difficult for the mandatory Powers to criticise Japan's standpoint. Being a non-League member and not holding a mandate, the US showed a more critical attitude towards Japan. However, its position was weakened by the precedent that the League had offered the US a mandate for Armenia in 1920.
It may therefore be argued that the League and the Powers' attitude towards the Japanese mandate reflected the concept of ‘enlightened colonial regime’ in the interwar period, embodied in the mandate system run by the League and the PAAP.

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This article focuses on the founding process of the Japan-America Student Conference (JASC) in 1934, and its development before the war by uncovering the “Lincoln Myth”—the conference by the students, for the students, of the students—, which indicates that JASC was realized only by the efforts of university students, who prepared, ran, and participated in it.
The founder of JASC was an university student, Nakayama Kimitake, who was born in Tokyo in 1912. He was inspired in his ambition to introduce Japan to the outside world in English, by reading Tsurumi Yusuke's books. Another and more significant factor was his family background. His family was one of the famous families in Tabuse (Yamaguchi Pref.), where many generals and politicians were born, and he learned strong nationalistic and Pan-Asian feelings from such surroundings.
After he decided to found. JASC, Nakayama established the Japan Student English Association (JSEA) in May, 1933. However, Nakayama and his JSEA were closely related to Nippon Bunka Domei (Japan Culture Association). The purpose of Bunka Domei was to propagate Japanese culture in foreign countries, by making many organizations like JSEA, and Bunka Domei regarded JSEA as one of its subordinate organizations.
It was too difficult for JSEA to work out its financial problems. They finally decided to send four students (Nakayama, Itabashi Namiji, Tabata Toshio, Endo Haruo) to the United States in order to find the way. On their arrival at Portland, American students and university scholars, as well as the Japanese who lived there welcomed them and many American students applied for the conference.
From the start, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) saw their activities as doubtful and unreliable. However, as their offer, which was based on irresponsible conditions, made a great impact on the Americans, MOFA could not stop them because, even though they didn't have the ability to made the conference possible, it would be more harmful to Japan-American relation if this conference couldn't be realized and anti-Japanese sentiment could be raised by its failure. That is why MOFA decided to support them. In short JSEA students succeeded by using Gaiatsu to commence the first conference.
After the first conference in July 1934, MOFA shrewdly recognized the effect of this conference on the amelioration of American feelings on Japan. Then MOFA presided to re-organize JSEA. It meant that JSEA had to be separated from Nakayama and Bunka Domei. Nakayama seemingly resisted this for a whle, however he left JASC and turned to activities in China, including reclamation work in Manchuria. JASC kept on until 1940 and was re-started in 1947 (to 1954), and from 1964 to the present.

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The Chinese Currency Reform of November 1935 and the Kodama Mission to China of March 1937 are generally thought to be important events in the lead up to the Sino-Japanese War. With regard to the currency reform, revisionists have tried to show that representatives of the Ministry of Finance, such as Takahashi Korekiyo and Tsushima Jyuichi, and others from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, such as Shigemitsu Mamoru sought to help make it a success. This paper however demonstrates that this is false by introducing new evidence. It also analyzes the manipulation of information by the army and the two civilian agents, Takahashi Kamekichi and Tachibana Shiraki, who sought to separate North China from the rest of China. Experts on China, such as Uchida Katsushi tried to insist on helping China to succeed in its currency reform from the viewpoint of financial interests. However, the army forced him not to express his opinion.
With regard to the Kodama Mission, this paper emphasizes its unusual importance. The mission sought to solve the Japan-China crisis in two ways. The first was to make a strong channel of cooperation between the business associations in the two countries in order to check the Japanese local army's plot to invade China and to lower the Chinese government's high anti-Japanese tariffs. The second was to make the Chinese government understand the Japanese government's will to control the army, prevent anti-Chinese smuggling and abolish the puppet government in North China. Its messenger was Fujiyama Aiichiro, the son-in-law of the Finance Minister Yuki Toyotaro, who promoted Sato's Peace Diplomacy. Fujiyama proposed to China a type of economic cooperation based on the idea of helping the Nanking Government to unify China and to reconstruct the Chinese economy. This idea grew out of his experience in Java. Yuki, his father-in-law, represented the financial sector and was one of the leaders of “Zaikai”, the Japanese business elite circle. At that time the only way to solve the Japan-China problem was to slow down the Japanese local army and to avoid the clash of economic and nationalistic interests between the two countries. The Kodama Mission and its planners, Finance Minister Yuki and Foreign Minister Sato tried to do that.
Their efforts failed in the end, but it was not an insignificant episode without any political support, as is often said. Konoe Fumimaro also pursued a similar plan, and he conveyed it to the Nanking Government through Uchida Katsushi. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war he started to make peaceful advances along the lines of the Kodama Mission's economic diplomacy approach.

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In the middle of the 1980s, we reached the stage in which most questions about French diplomacy in the 1930s could be answered, thanks to the declassification of documents on the eve of the Second World War. This paper aims to survey recent researches on French appeasement policy and to examine how and to what extent important topics have been analyzed.
In traditional studies historians tended to point out that the following factors lay behind the French appeasement policy: the French “immobilism”, the economic-industrial slump since 1931, the unpreparedness in rearmament and the inefficiency of the decision-making process. It was asserted that these factors accentuated France's sense of inferiority and pessimism and intensified the domestic strife.
There was some anticipation that the newly opened records might reveal unknown facts which would lead to the revision of such “negative” views about the French foreign policy. But, in my view, we failed to offer “revisionist” accounts regarding French appeasement. Without any significant paradigmatic breakthrough, historians try to give detailed accounts about the facts and the new findings, to attempt to relativize the authorized historical interpretations, and to integrate and structuralize the known historical facts.
In this paper I will focus on several works which attempted to relativize the authorized interpretations about the scale of French rearmament and the nature of French-German economic relations.
It is well known that French arms were neither numerous nor efficient enough in 1939, and it is also clear that rearmament became a great strain on France's limited budgets and resources. However, according to Robert Frank's new meticulous research, the defense expenditure from 1936 was higher than that on the eve of the First World War. Even though the French rearmament budget in nominal terms was reduced from 1931 to 1935, France in fact succeeded in spending stable amounts of money on armaments.
As for French-German economic relations S. Shirmann conducted detailed research on the period from 1932 to 1939, asking whether France could deter German expansonism by means of economic appeasement. As a whole, French-German relations did not really become reciprocal and mutual. Since Schacht planned to complete state exchange controls France was forced to be subject to German demands for autarky.

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We have witnessed in contemporary Europe the development of decentralization in nation-states, and at the European level, the improvement of the status of a sub-national region as a political actor by, for example, the creation of the Committee of the Regions by Maastricht Treaty. The region, in many cases, has characteristics as a geographical territory and at the same time as a stage on which a political ethnic movement (ethnoregionalism) progresses (the region is a homeland for the ethnic entity). This paper insists on this duality of characterization of European regions by territory and ethnicity.
When we see the process itself of decentralization in European countries, there are a variety of ways or degrees of state reform: central governmental power stays rather strong in France on one hand, Belgium has been transformed into a federal state on the other. But it is certain, in spite of the differences of the process, that the European states as a whole are inclined toward decentralization, where ethnoregionalism plays an important role as the main power for the quest for the region's territorial autonomy or independence.
From the European point of view, we can state that regional authorities have growing power in favor of politics and cultures of their own. This change in power is obvious especially in the EU and the Council of Europe where the regions can obtain considerable support owing to development of the European organizations, which supply them with official status so as to speak for their own interests (ex. Committee of the Regions of the EU), and the European framework for saving and promoting ethnic minorities' cultures elaborated by the Council of Europe's works, such as the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages or the Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, which contribute to gradually forming an international regime by which states are forced to make concessions to ethno-regions.
In Europe today, treating a region only as a territory in the context that issues are focused on economic and administrative but not cultural aspects is not sufficient for understanding the reality of regional level politics, for in most countries regional ethnicity is an indispensable factor in both national and European politics. We have to approach regional politics with an awareness of this duality of territory and ethnicity.

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The 1985 reform brought about a historical change in Japan's telecommunications business by liberalizing common carrier services. Many of the New Common Carriers (NCCs) since then have entered the various segments of the telecommunications service market in Japan, which had been monopolized by NTT or KDD. At the same time, the newly established Telecommunications Business Law empowered the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) to regulate the entry of NCCs for the purpose of demand-and-supply adjustment. With this regulatory authority, MPT was capable of restricting the number of new entrants and, by so doing, influencing the structure of Japan's telecommunications service market. MPT's adjustment policy, nonetheless, was not always effective in the presence of foreign pressure. The U. S. government, in particular, pressured its Japanese counterpart to allow more NCCs to enter the market, hoping that freer entry would provide U. S. carriers and telecommunications equipment manufacturers with greater business opportunities in Japan.
This study examines how foreign pressure may be related to domestic politics by analyzing three cases of demand-and-supply adjustment in Japan's telecommunications services: (1) satellite service, (2) cellular service, and (3) international service. In each case, foreign pressure was applied to change the adjustment policy in favor of foreign carriers and manufacturers. However, the cases differed from one another in the extent to which foreign pressure was effective in promoting a policy change; foreign pressure brought about a drastic change in international service (abandonment of the adjustment), a moderate change in cellular service (revision of the adjustment), and no significant change in satellite service (continuation of the adjustment).
I argue that the variance in outcome is explained by the domestic politics in Japan rather than foreign pressure per se. Domestic politics here refers to the coalition politics among the domestic actors that had interests in the regulation of telecommunications services. The analysis in this study suggests that foreign pressure was most effective in changing the demand-and-supply adjustment policy when such change was supported by major domestic actors, especially large users of telecommunications services. Although users in general are assumed to be silent in the politics of regulation, large business users had a way to represent their interests through Keidanren. In short, the effectiveness of foreign pressure depended on the domestic political environment of the target country-most important of all, the preferences of the major actors involved.

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