ABSTRACT
Japan's Proposal B, which was offered by the Japanese government in November, could also be taken as a 'modus vivendi' in its original Japanese version, although the inadequate Magic, which had already quite often negatively mistranslated or distorted Japanese diplomatic secret code messages, clearly defined it as an 'ultimatum'. In fact, Secretary of State Hull, for example, states even in his work published after the end of the Pacific War: 'We knew from our intercepts of Japanese Government messages how strong was the German pressure being applied in Tokyo. In addition, it is important to remember that the vital question of whether Japan might have fought against the Russians in the North instead of opening hostilities against the Western Allies in the southern and eastern regions was still open. Of course, Hull could not know from the intercepts about this serious mistranslation, which virtually reversed the meaning of the original text.
