This issue represents an academic attempt to shed light on the functions of those who work “behind the scenes” in diplomatic negotiations or what is termed here as “informal contact-makers.” Known by various names such as emissaries, secret envoys, secret agents, fixers, intermediaries, diplomatic brokers and back-channel contacts, these informal contac-makers often play significant roles in state-to-state negotiations, particularly when the parties involved are in tense conflict over issues such as war, territory, trade and the like, but are interested in establishing contacts with each other. Informal contact-makers, in such cases, can often play a more effective role than can formal contact-makers who, because of official credentials, find it difficult to compromise in officially-announced conferences.
The functions of contact-makers are viewed in terms of two dimensions: whether their acts of contacting are under “official” sanction or not (“unofficial”) and whether their contacts are pre-announced to the public or not. The combination of the two dimensions will produce four types of contact-makers: (1) those who have official credentials and meet for pre-announced meetings (although the contents of the proceedings may well be kept secret); and (2) those who have official credentials but meet for unannounced, i. e., secret meetings; (3) those who have no official credentials but meet for pre-announced meetings; and (4) those who have no official credentials and meet for secret contacts.
The first type, i. e., official=pre-announced contact-makers are also called “formal contact-makers” such as those attending binational top-level meetings. The second type, i. e., “official=unannounced contact-makers, ” refers to emissaries sent by the authorities and the like. The third type, i. e., “unofficial=unannounced contact-makers” are related to self-appointed emissaries, so to speak. The fourth type may be termed “unofficial=pre-announced contact-makers” such as political and business leaders contacting the other party voluntarily. The last three types are together classified as “informal contact-makers.”
The functions and types of informal contact-makers appear to be affected by various factors including the nature of diplomatic issues, the nature of relations between the governments concerned, the geographical distance between the governments concerned, and the political culture supportive of the role of informal contact-akers. Eight articles, selected here to provide case studies of prewar and postwar Japanese diplomatic negotiations, generally follow this conceptual framework. They suggest that Asian political cultures such as those of China, Korea, the Philippines as well as Japan are more conducive to informal contact-makers than are Western cultures. In Western societies as well, however, a network of personal ties among influentials sometimes plays a significant role.

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On June 1931, three agents of International Communist movement in Asia were arrested in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. A French man arrested in Singapore, Joseph Ducroux, tried to make Singapore a regional center (“hub”) of Communist movement. The person arrested in Hong Kong was Nguyen Ai Quoc, who later became the first president of Vietnam under the name of Ho Chi Minh after the World War II. He was a regional promoter assigned to instruct Communist movements in French Indochina, Siam and British Malaya, and to connect these Southeast Asian movements to Shanghai. The last man arrested in Shanghai was Hilaire Noulens, real name Yakov Matveevich Rudnik, a liaison officer of the Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern.
These arrests (which I call the “Noulens Case”) had a strong impact on the International Communist movement in Asia and also on the activity of the British Security System. In this paper, I first reconstruct the International Communist movement in Asia mainly from archival documents on the “Noulens Case” in the Shanghai Municipal Police Files. I then explain how the British Security System monitored this movement and arrested three agents in 1931. The British Security System checked the human movements in and out the empire by combining the Passport Control System with the Political Intelligence such as Special Branch in colonial police. Finally, I analyze the International Communist movement in Asia, the activity of the British Security System, and the impact of “Noulens Case” on these two from the network point of view defined by US physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. In his book “Linked: The New Science of Networks”, Barabasi argues that the key component of the network is the “hub”. Once we focus on “hub”, we can explain the rise and fall of the network, i. e. “the dynamics of the network”.
In the International Communist movement in Asia, the “hub” was a liaison officer such as Noulens in Shanghai and a regional promoter such as Nguyen Ai Quoc in Hong Kong. Their arrest meant the disappearance of a “hub” from the movement, and the movement itself was set back severely for a while. On the other hand, from the “Noulens Case”, the British Security System was able to obtain a lot of information about the activity of the International Communist movement in Asia and the agents who joined it.

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