This essay revisits the drafting of the Third Konoe Declaration in light of the groundbreaking research of Terumasa Nakanishi.
Drawing on intelligence studies by Kunio Kasugai, it reveals the deep involvement of Soviet agent Hotsumi Ozaki in shaping a document that severed the path to peace and altered Japan’s historical trajectory.
An essential historical analysis for a global audience.

Needless to say, this essay instantly resolved questions that had long troubled me, and it is a work worthy of a Nobel Prize and more.
2016-11-09.
After reading this essay by Terumasa Nakanishi, Emeritus Professor of Kyoto University—an essay more than merely important—I recalled how my mentor once told me that I should advance to Kyoto University, remain there, and support the institution with both shoulders.
That guidance was entirely correct.
Needless to say, this essay instantly resolved questions that had long troubled me, and it is a work worthy of a Nobel Prize and more.
The reason my mentor had me appear twice as a lecturer was that I knew more than he did about Russia on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution.
At the time, my knowledge of Russia stemmed from having read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina during my middle-school years.
Yet I had long found it strange that I knew almost nothing about the modern and contemporary history in which Japan was involved.
As a subscriber to the Asahi Shimbun, this ignorance was even more complete.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

The Third Konoe Declaration issued on December 22, 1938 is said to have presented the so-called Three Konoe Principles of good-neighborly relations, joint anti-communism, and economic cooperation.
What is crucial, however, is the passage urging Wang Jingwei to establish a new regime in the pursuit of constructing a New Order in East Asia.
In fact, on the twentieth of the previous month, Wang Jingwei’s envoys, including Gao Zongwu, visited Japan and reached an agreement with the Japanese government to promote peace on the conditions that China would recognize Manchukuo and that Japanese troops would withdraw within two years.
Yet, for reasons unknown, the officially announced Third Declaration omitted any reference to the withdrawal of Japanese forces.
This constituted a major breach of promise by Japan.
Having already resolved to part ways with Chiang Kai-shek and having cut off his own retreat by leaving Chongqing, Wang was compelled to press forward with the peace line, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Nanjing National Government in 1940.
In any case, with the disappearance of troop withdrawal from this Wang Jingwei initiative, the path to peace with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government was completely severed.
It has also recently become clear that Hotsumi Ozaki, who had entered the Konoe Cabinet as a commissioned adviser, played an extremely significant role in drafting the Third Konoe Declaration.
This was revealed in Information and Intrigue, a major two-volume work by Kunio Kasugai, an intelligence specialist who served in the Cabinet Intelligence Office for twenty-two years beginning in 1965.
Kasugai identified as evidence documents from the defense materials of Ken Inukai, who was prosecuted for leaking state secrets to Ozaki in the Sorge Spy Ring incident.
Inukai was a close friend of Ozaki and had been politically appointed from the House of Representatives to the position of adviser in the Ministry of Communications during the First Konoe Cabinet.
These defense materials are preserved at Kyoto University, and our research group has confirmed their contents.
Within them, Inukai unequivocally states that “Ozaki drafted the Third Konoe Declaration together with Tomohiko Ushiba, the Prime Minister’s secretary.”
According to the trial records, Ozaki’s draft was revised by another party due to objections from the Army, and finalized with additions reflecting Prime Minister Konoe’s views.
Nevertheless, on the night of this work, even the head of the Information Department stationed at the Prime Minister’s residence was kept uninformed, while Ozaki remained late into the night in his room directly beneath the Prime Minister’s secretariat.
Although the extent to which Ozaki shaped the final content remains unclear, a person intent on crushing peace in the China Incident, exhausting both Japan and China, and provoking revolution was involved in drafting a document that determined Japan’s fate.
What could this be if not a historical scandal that threw Japan’s destiny into disarray.
The Inukai trial records contain even more astonishing facts.
To be continued.