ABSTRACT
WERE the secrecy of diplomacy to be abolished, as some enthusiastic reformers promised it would after the Great War, some interesting facts might be disclosed regarding the visit of Mr. Martial Merlin, the Governor of French Indo-China, to Japan in May 1924. He was received with royal honours, and no visiting sovereign could have been more obsequiously entertained. Much was rumoured about a commercial treaty which was to enable Japan to supply the French Indies with some goods in partial exchange for the rice that she purchased there. But French colonial policy is not easily modified, and four years later it was still pending, though another treaty had been concluded meanwhile. It was suspected, however, that more highly political questions were really at issue. A group in Paris had informed the world that they were the directors of the RussoAsiatic Bank and therefore the shareholders of the Chinese Eastern Railway, and there was a good deal of speculation as to whether Mr. Merlin was really in Japan on the business of entering into an engagement that should console Japan for the lapse of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and, in the accepted manner, guarantee the integrity and independence of North Manchuria. A much livelier attention was directed towards the question when Mr. Karahan, the Soviet Ambassador in Peking, closed a bargain whereby the Soviet Government secured the management of the railway, under a Chinese President. It was after this that Mr. Karahan’s conversations were resumed with Mr. Yoshizawa, the Japanese Minister in Peking, and at last, on January 21, 1925, a treaty was signed settling the
Saghalien question on the basis of Japan exploiting the oilfields and getting half the oil as her share. Thus was Nikolaevsk avenged, and the Japanese troops returned in the early summer following. Regular diplomatic relations were soon resumed, but it was to take over three years for the negotiators to conclude a Fisheries Convention.
