ABSTRACT
THE atmosphere around the Yoshizawa mission might be less explosive than that in which the Kobayashi mission had arrived, but there was a growing tenseness. On the one hand, the limitation of exports from the United States to Japan had been extended to iron and steel scrap on 16th October, and the Burma Road had been reopened on 18th October 1940. On the other, the occupation of Northern Indo-China by Japanese troops and the gradual strengthening of Japanese influence in Thailand converted the theoretical possibility of trade in war materials with Germany, via the Siberian railway, Into a very practical proposition, particularly with regard to rubber and tin. The general outlook had been brightened by the British successes in North Africa and the magnificent stand of the Greeks, but in the succeeding months the shadows of reverse and disaster in Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, and Libya, were to darken the picture again. The blockade had to be tightened to the utmost, and all the time Herr Wohltat, head of the German economic mission to Japan, was in Japan to see to it that Germany got in as much as possible through the back door.
