63.
This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government, and should be
returned to the Foreign Office if not required for official use.]
82
(F 8276/130/10).
TO JAPAN
Lü
Cypher telegram to Sir R. Craigie (Tokyo).
Foreign Office. 21st October, 1937. 8 p.n.
No. 416.
IMPORTANT.
Your telegram No.499 [of October 7th] and previous corres-
pondence: [Inspection of British ships in Chinese waters by
Japanese naval forces.
1. All merchant ships over 150 tons gross register and regis-
tered inter alia in the United Kingdon, Hongkong and Singapore (but
not in Shanghai) are required to carry night signalling apparatus.
It should therefore in general be practicable for Japanese warships
to communicate with British ships which they may encounter, and you
need not take up this point with the Japanese. As regards the
difficulty of boarding in bad weather, you should make it clear to
the Japanese Government that His Majesty's Government could not regard
this as a justifiable excuse for impeding the voyage of a vessel,
either by ordering her to remain stopped for a long time or by
diverting her to sheltered water,
2. It is not considered desirable that information regarding
destination should be supplied to the Japanese authorities.
3. It is both undesirable on general grounds and impracticable
to comply with the Japanese request to be supplied with a schedule of
the sailings of British ships. As the Japanese Government will
appreciate, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in-
for ation about the sailin s of every British ship in Chinese waters,
and undue and perhaps dangerous suspicion would necessarily fall on
those ships about which the Japanese had not been informed.
4. His Majesty's Covernment cannot agree to the inspection of
any documents other than the certificate of registry. For your own
information. In cases where ships have been sailing under false
flags.....
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