1. This conference on North Pacific Fisheries questions was called by Japan, with invitations going only to the United States and Canada. In the Japanese Peace Treaty the Government of Japan had undertaken to enter promptly into negotiations with other nations with respect to the conservation of fisheries resources in the high seas. Although the Peace Treaty had not yet been ratified by a majority of the sig­natory countries or by the United States, the Supreme Commander had given the Government of Japan ad hoc powers to negotiate a fisheries treaty on equal footing with Canada and the United States.

2. The Canadian representatives at the conference were the Honourable R.W. Mayhew, Minister of Fisheries, Mr. Stewart Bates, Deputy Minister of Fisheries, Mr. E.T. Applewhaite, M.P., Mr. Arthur R. Menzies, Canadian Diplomatic Repre­sentative in Tokyo, Mr. S.V. Ozere, Legal Adviser, Department of Fisheries, Dr. John L. Hart, Director, Pacific Biological Station and Mr. John M. Buchanan, Pres­ident, British Columbia Packers, Limited.

3. The Japanese delegation included the Minister of Agriculture and the Vice/Minister of Foreign Affairs, but they were present only at the opening and closing plenary sessions. The negotiations were conducted by the Honourable lwao Fujita, Director of the Fisheries Agency, Mr. Masao Sogawa of the Fisheries Agency, and Mr. Jun Tsuchiya, Director of the European and American Affairs Bureau of the Foreign Office. The remainder of the Japanese delegation comprised industrial advisers, members of the House Committees on Fisheries and officials of the Foreign Office.

4. The United States delegation was headed by Mr. W.C. Herrington, Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary of State. Two other Washington officials and five industrial advisers made up the remainder of the United States delegation.

Background

5. The main concern of Canada and the United States was that species of fish in the Eastern Pacific seas which had been conserved by us jointly or severally should not be open to free fishing on the part of the Japanese. The conservation of these main species (salmon, halibut, herring) has been costly to both Canada and the United States, to the governments, and to the fishing industries. The stocks so built up, however, spend most of their lives on the high seas where there is a generally accepted right of free fishing for all nations. Before the last war, Japanese factory ships had crossed to Bristol Bay area but had met strong diplomatic protests from the United States. With the improvement in fishing techniques, Japanese factory ships are now able to fish at even greater distances from their home bases and to do this economically. The loss of the Kamchatka salmon fishery to the Russians might be expected to lead to an intensification of Japanese fishing on the North American side of the Pacific. The limitation of other resources following her defeat might likewise be expected to induce Japan to try to make still greater use of the free resources on the high seas. For long she has been the world's leading fishing nation and the above conditions all suggest her need for a still further development of this basic industry.

6. To provide some satisfactory protection against these possibilities the United States Government pressed Japan to convene this tripartite fisheries conference.

United States Draft Treaty

7. When the United States Government was preparing the terms of the general Peace Treaty, its Mr. Foster Dulles reached an agreement with Prime Minister Yoshida of Japan who announced in February, 1951, that Japan would prohibit her nationals from carrying on fishing operations in the conserved fisheries of other countries until negotiations for fisheries treaties could be undertaken. The United States State Department thereupon prepared a draft fisheries treatyt that would be supplemental to the peace treaty itself. The preliminary United States draft was shown to the Canadian Government in April and there followed prolonged discus­sions on the principle of the treaty to be negotiated. Only on the eve of the confer­ence itself did Canada and the United States reach agreement on the kind of treaty they wished to negotiate with Japan. Indeed the conference had to be postponed for three weeks to permit settlement of the Canadian-American differences before their delegations proceeded to Japan.

8. The first United States draft proposed certain principles. In brief, the sugges­tion was that nations through bilateral or multi-lateral agreement should abstain from the exercise of their right under International Law to participate in the har­vesting of a high seas fishery resource (a) when a country has that resource under scientific study and (b) when a country regulates its fishermen to conserve that resource and (c) where that resource is already fully utilized on a sustained yield basis. If two of the parties have thus investigated, regulated, and utilized a fishery, the third party should waive its rights.

9. This principle was hedged by exceptions. (1) No party should waive its right if it has been or is exploiting that fishery on a substantial scale or (2) No party should waive a right to any resource in the high seas contiguous to its territorial waters or to a fishery harvested by some country not party to the treaty.

10. The United States draft also contained machinery for studying and carrying out the application of these principles through the establishment of a Commission on which the three governments would be represented. Other clauses related to enforcement and the like.

11. In the initial discussions with the United States Government, Canada indi­cated that these principles gave her insufficient protection. Canadian fishermen had not established fishing operations to any extent along the Alaskan coast or along the coast of the United States proper. The application of these principles in the future might put Canada in the position of being asked to waive her right to fish salmon or other resources in these waters. The United States fishermen, however, have historically fished the British Columbia coast and could not be asked to waive rights anywhere from the Behring Sea southwards. Canada also felt that her rela­tions with the United States in these waters were unique but that the three-way treaty being proposed by the United States could, if it had the powers of excluding Japan from the certain fisheries, contain also the power to exclude Canada.

12. A further exception, therefore, was put in the United States draft at our insis­tence. It provided that because of inter-mingling of fishing stocks, operations and joint regulation programmes, neither Canada nor the United States would be asked to waive fishing rights in the high seas contiguous to the coasts of Canada and the United States, from and including the Gulf of Alaska southwards. In short, no mat­ter where the principles applied, only in the Behring Sea could Canada be asked to abstain from fishing.

13. This clause was embarrassing to the United States from the beginning because in effect it said while we were both subscribing to these principles, we were making an exception in their application down our whole coasts from the Gulf of Alaska to the south. This clause was to prove difficult in the negotiations with the Japanese, since they interpreted the United States draft principles as restricting only Japan, with Canada and the United States being exempt under this clause.

14. Canada, however, had to insist on its insertion. Canada, making a bilateral treaty with the United States alone on fisheries, would not have accepted a treaty with such principles. The exception mentioned above had therefore to be added to prevent these principles being enforced against Canada, and to leave Canadian­American relations unchanged in the whole fishery from the Gulf of Alaska south­wards. By reason of this exception, the door could still be left open for a later fisheries treaty of any type between the United States and Canada.

15. The proposed treaty and the principles embodied in the United States draft were referred to Cabinet for approval before the Canadian delegation proceeded to Japan.

General Features of Tokyo Conference

16. After the opening plenary session the conference resolved itself into two Committees, a Committee on Principles and Drafting and a Committee on Biology.

17. The latter Committee did not meet for some time because the head of the United States delegation felt that the biological questions should not be discussed with the Japanese until there was agreement on principles. We disagreed with this view. We felt that meetings of the biologists of the three countries would acquaint each with the general and particular biological problems of the North Pacific, that they would provide the men who might later be servicing the proposed Interna­tional Commission with chances for exchanging views and ideas, and that the bio­logical discussions on the fishery resources themselves and their relation to principles, would help to allay Japanese fears as to the extent of exclusion the United States and ourselves had in mind. The mill of negotiations must have grist: the conference could not grind out a treaty so long as the Japanese were unaware of the species from which they might be excluded: until then, the principles were a mill without grist.

18. These views were not, however, acceptable to the United States and they were able to defer the meeting of the Biological Committee until the fourth week of the conference. This contributed to delay because the final, and one of the most diffi­cult, questions of the whole conference was a biological one. After the treaty was drafted and ready for signing - with the exception of the Annex - the Biological Committee was still at work on the Behring Sea problem (discussed later).

19. The Committee on Principles and Drafting met daily, the chairman alternat­ing between the three countries. It took some three weeks to reach agreement on general principles. Thereafter, this Committee, which had been a committee of the whole, was replaced by a small drafting committee of three from each country. Throughout the proceedings of all committees, translations had to be made and this, too, contributed to the lengthy negotiations.

United States Position and Actions

20. The United States draft was in itself a compromise of many American views - views of the fishing industry, views of the Fish and Wildlife Service, and diver­gent views within the State Department itself. In Washington in May we met the United States State Department when it had four distinct views within it: one from the international lawyers, another from the economists, a third from the Far Eastern Division and a fourth from the Fisheries Section.²² Within itself therefore, the United States had had a problem in reconciling views, and the United States draft treaty contained quite a delicate adjustment of these. Consequently, at the Confer­ence, the head of the United States delegation had little room to manoeuver.

21. This circumstance quite frequently affected the American attitude at the con­ference. Occasionally it appeared as if the United States intended to force its docu­ment on the Japanese. Because of the Occupation, the fact that the Peace Treaty was not yet ratified in the United States, and because the head of the delegation had spent four years in Japan and was aware of the weaknesses in Japan's own conser­vation programmes, the United States delegation at times resorted to what might be described as more than peaceful persuasion of the Japanese. This had an effect on the Japanese delegation itself; their Fisheries Division was apt to resist this type of pressure and to discuss the treaty on its own merits, while their Foreign Office representative was constantly mindful of the United States. He in turn would exert pressure on Fujita, the Director of Fisheries. During negotiations if some particular point seemed difficult to reach agreement on, the threat that the United States would go to Premier Yoshida for a decision was implicit. On two occasions it was explicit and on one occasion was actually exercised. We feared that this type of pressure would enable Fujita and the Japanese fishing industry to state in the future that they had not accepted the particular point and that it had only been forced on them in the conference by external American Government pressure.

22. On the first day of the conference we discussed with the head of the United States Delegation the method of presenting his draft. We recommended that the draft, as a draft, should not be shown and that in the beginning only the clause covering the principles and the exceptions should be presented to the conference. Following such a discussion on principles we thought the other parts of the draft might be brought out piece by piece as the conference progressed. The head of the United States delegation differed from this view and declared that he intended to present the whole draft to the conference on the day following the plenary session. These meetings were in camera and he was anxious that the Japanese industrial advisers who were present should see the draft as a whole. This course was fol­lowed. Unfortunately, on the day after its presentation, the United States draft was published in full in a Hokkaido newspaper. This leak produced rudeness from the Americans and embarrassment on the part of the Japanese. The United States abil­ity to manoeuver was reduced still further, since their proposals now became a mat­ter of comment in the public press.

23. The Japanese embarrassment, however, extended beyond the copyroom of the Foreign Office. They felt it incumbent on them now to prepare a Japanese draft.? This Fisheries Conference, it will be recalled, was the first that the Japanese had attended for many years, and to justify their position they felt it necessary, now that the United States draft was in the press, to have a quite distinctive and different Japanese draft. Accordingly, the first week of sessions at the Committee on Princi­ples was devoted to discussions of the United States draft, the second to the presen­tation and study of the Japanese draft and the third to the attempt to reconcile or harmonize these. In passing it may be said at this point that the Japanese proposals were based on the principles underlying the International Whaling Convention -that is, a respect for conservation laws and procedures but with no exclusion of any country from the exercise of its right to fish the particular resource under these conservation laws.

24. Another condition that led to delay and misunderstanding came through the offer of the head of the United States delegation to explain the United States draft. The document itself was quite explicit. It had already been cleared with the various branches in the United States, including the legal officers. Mr. Herrington's expla­nations tended to confuse rather than elucidate its principles and exceptions. The Japanese seemed to think Herrington was being evasive, and this led them to very close questioning of the United States draft - Fujita showing excellent insight into the problem during the course of the proceedings. One example of this confusion will suffice. In Article VII of the American draft there was a provision that the Commission shall "study any fisheries resource specified in the Annex for the pur­pose of determining annually whether such resource continues to qualify for waiver or whether wider access under effective conservation arrangements can be devel­oped". In explaining this provision, Herrington said that the word "or" meant "and if so". We insisted that it meant "and if not". The Japanese seized upon the Ameri­can interpretation since it might permit them entry into fisheries that would other-wise be closed, and it was only through long argument that the Americans could be extricated from this wrongful interpretation of their own draft.

25. Another point of interest to us was the character of the American delegation itself. The whole group, both officials and advisers, was different in personnel from that which had negotiated the North West Atlantic Fisheries Treaty two years ear-lier. The Japanese, however, made frequent references to the Atlantic Treaty and in some particulars would have liked the Pacific Treaty to be similar in nature. No member of the American team, however, was familiar with the Atlantic Treaty, and therefore able to explain its clauses and the rationale and raison d'etre of each.

26. The composition of the United States delegation seemed to have been poured from an unusual mould. Unlike the other two delegations it had no parliamentary representatives. It was heavily weighted with industry advisers. It had no senior representation from SCAP or the American Embassy in Tokyo. It seemed an incomplete team, and its nature was a little mystifying to the Japanese from the beginning.

27. Perhaps fish merchants are apt to be rough. They certainly created the impres­sion among the Japanese that they intended to get something in the fisheries treaty they thought they should have had in the Peace Treaty itself - namely a complete exclusion of the Japanese from the Eastern Pacific. The Japanese delegation began to fear that the Security Treaty was only the first of a series of American pressures on them that would eventually produce a group of treaties which, taken together, might prove to be the equivalent of a Carthaginian peace.

28. Because of this the Japanese delegation gradually looked more and more to the Canadian delegation to be fair and impartial. On two occasions the head of the Japanese delegation came to our Embassy much disturbed over American-Japanese differences and asked us to use our good offices in finding a reconciliation, without which they threatened to withdraw completely from the negotiations. Our delega­tion was in an unusually difficult position and the role of mediator was not easy to play. We had made definite commitments to the United States before leaving for Japan. We had too insisted on the insertion of a clause in the treaty that for the most part excluded us from the application of its principles. Our own failure to subscribe completely to the principles made it difficult for us to persuade the Japanese to accept them and our previous commitment to the Americans made it equally diffi­cult for us to persuade them to abandon them.

Japanese Position and Attitudes

29. The Supreme Commander had indicated "that the Japanese delegation will negotiate and conclude the said international convention on the basis that the Gov­ernment of Japan possesses ad hoc sovereign equality with the governments of Canada and the United States". With the Occupation, the Security Pact, the unrati­fied Peace Treaty, with the nation "moulting, sick, in the dreadful wind of change", this declaration - meant to be magnanimous - merely pointed up the underlying weakness of the Japanese bargaining position. In the negotiations the Japanese del- egation often revealed their doubts on their bargaining position with the United States. The United States delegation was quite content to leave this doubt in the Japanese minds, and as mentioned earlier, occasionally to confirm the doubts by referring to the possibility of going to a higher authority for a decision on some knotty point.

30. From time to time therefore the Japanese delegation seemed to be testing the limits of United States' resistance to Japanese interests. To some extent this was being done for interests beyond fisheries. Attached to the Japanese delegation but unnamed, was a group of post-war diplomats who were having their initial exper­iences in international negotiations. This group of onlookers swelled in numbers on each occasion in which there were differences between Canada and the United States. Mr. Tsuchiya of the Foreign Office confided their interest in Canadian­American relations, in watching how the Canadians handled themselves in the face of American opposition, how they resisted United States pressures, and sought to effect United States compromises. Tsuchiya mentioned that after ratification of the Peace Treaty, Japan under its Security Pact with the United States, feels that her relations with the great power may be in some respects like those of Canada. Hence the interest of the Foreign Office in watching every move made between Canadians and Americans.

31. Another circumstance affected the whole Japanese thinking on this treaty. For the immediate future, their most important relations in fisheries are likely to be with Asiatic countries, with Russia and China, with Korea, with Indonesia, Austra­lia, all of whom desire a rigorous exclusion of Japanese fishing vessels from their adjacent seas. The Japanese had therefore to test the principles of the United States draft and its exceptions against all of these possible Asiatic relations, to ensure that no part of this treaty - in principles, in exceptions, in enforcement regulations or in the Commission structure - could possibly be used as a precedent against them in treaties with any of these other countries.

32. The current attempt to codify Japanese laws in general added to this problem. Since this treaty will become Japanese law, any of its clauses might become part of a code that they would have to apply to other fisheries treaties.

33. The condition mentioned in the previous paragraphs produced another result which in turn had features of its own. While there was a constant problem of get­ting accurate translations between the English language and Japanese, the Japanese delegation were obviously aiming at imprecision in the final wording of clauses. This was being done purposely so that they could later interpret the treaty and its terms with some degree of latitude. On one point on which there was a sharp differ­ence between the Japanese and the Canadians, they suggested we leave the English text in a way that would suit us while they would make the Japanese text conform to their own wishes! This honest dishonesty prevented our congratulating ourselves on our moral superiority but led us to insist that no clause in the treaty should read in opposite ways in the different languages. The incident added zeal to the efforts of the Americans and ourselves to see that language and translation would be as precise as possible. The senior translator at the Canadian Legation, Mr. Iwamoto, was very helpful in this particular.

34. This kind of thing, and the subsequent struggle for unanimity of understand­ing and identity of language in the two texts helps to explain the protracted negotiations.

35. As we moved into the Sub-Committee on Drafting after there had been gen­eral agreement on principle, we found that each article was treated, not so much as a part of the final draft, but as an entity in itself. Indeed, the whole treaty, it might be said, was reviewed in each clause. Matters of principle that we thought were settled weeks before would come up again and again for new consideration or for qualification. They would dwell so long on a single article that we feared it would take them prisoner. But not so. Each clause gave them another chance to question the principles of the treaty itself, to argue for the inalienable right of free fishing on an equal footing with all on the high seas, to battle the Canada-United States princi-ples that would result in their exclusion from certain fisheries. They knew, as Charles James Fox said, that the same reason dished out in ten different forms was as effective in debate as ten different reasons. Each article in the Treaty therefore allowed them to revive the one idea - the right of free and equal exploitation of fisheries everywhere. In consequence their arguments were frequently free of the trammels of logic! Their argument often presupposed that reason never controls human affairs: the United States draft presumed that it always does.

36. In this atmosphere, it became a matter of outlasting them in negotiations. One of the Japanese industrial advisers warned me early in the meetings that it had taken Mr. Fujita many months to complete his negotiations with the Russians in Moscow before the war. He went on to say that following our treaty the Indone­sians would be in Tokyo. I asked when the Indonesian negotiations started and was told that it would be December 17th. Our treaty was concluded on December 14th and I think negotiations had lasted by then just as long as the Japanese had wished.

37. One feature that may be worthy of note was the frequent discussions between the Japanese delegation and the Fisheries Committee of the Diet. All questions of principle had to be cleared by Fujita with the Committee during the course of the conference - a point that might indicate a growth of more democratic procedures, and new strength of the elected representatives as against bureaucrats.²³ Coupled with this was Fujita's occasional concern as to how he could explain away some compromise being suggested to him, and on more than one occasion he specially asked for the advice of the other delegations as to how he could interpret the partic­ularly difficult point to the Diet.

38. For quite other reasons, it should be noted too that when the conference opened, the Chairman of the Fisheries Committee in the House of Councillors and the Chairman of the Fisheries Committee in the House of Representatives were both numbered among the advisers to the Japanese delegation. At one point in the negotiations, when the Japanese delegation conceded their willingness to abstain from the exercise of fishing rights in the Eastern Pacific, these elected representa­tives dissociated themselves from the subsequent proceedings. This was done with­out fuss and at the time we were inclined to interpret this action as having only local political significance - in the sense that neither of these chairmen would wish to have their names associated with a treaty in which Japan waived its rights to fish. Another set of later events may, however, give this action a different significance.

39. The Japanese wished to have a treaty of only five years duration, the Ameri­cans wished fifteen and a compromise was made at ten. During private discussions with one of the Japanese industrialists, he mentioned that for the next five years Japan would not wish to fish our side of the Pacific, since she had to build up her long-distance fishing fleet and since these would, in the interim, likely be going only as far as the Behring Sea anyway. The nature of the remarks, and the manner of their making, left a hint that we might, at the expiration of the treaty, have to face the whole issue anew.

40. Still other factors add to this impression. Japan agreed to abstain from fishing salmon, halibut and herring in the Eastern Pacific. Under the same principles she could have asked Canada and the United States to abstain from fishing some spe­cies around her coasts. She refused however to ask for such abstention on our part. In private we quietly pressed for some explanation of her attitude but none was forthcoming. Thus Japan has subscribed to the principles but has refused to apply them in her own interest. She thereby makes it patent that the treaty is for the sole advantage of Canada and the United States of America. Is she thereby following a course that will permit her to say later she subscribed only under duress of the Occupation and the unratified Peace Treaty, and that since she did not apply the treaty in her own interest, she will be free, in the eyes of the world, to abrogate it at the end of the treaty period?

41. Two other later events might be mentioned. The Honourable Mr. Nemoto who signed the treaty was dismissed from the Cabinet within a week of its signing. We believed this was due to his rice policy which had been under criticism in the Diet. Since returning to Canada, Mr. Narita, the Japanese representative in Ottawa, informed me within forty-eight hours of its happening, that Mr. Fujita had been dismissed from the service. He was the Director of Fisheries, one of the most senior of all civil servants in Japan, in our view the ablest man at the conference, with a keen legal mind and a deep insight into all the international fisheries rela­tions of his country. His dismissal seems to fit into the above pattern of incidents.

42. Their self-interest prompted the Japanese to be vague in the declaration of principles, to be flexible in the model of the Commission, to be loose in treaty language, to hide and not reveal true intent. These things they were unable to achieve. But the above pattern of incidents, the action and reaction within Japan, may hint what broods in the deep recesses of the official Japanese imagination. Perhaps the treaty may prove to be, in A.N. Whitehead's phrase "nothing but an average stability of certain events in a set of agitations".

The Issues Before the Conference

43. The main questions are covered in a separate memorandumt attached hereto and prepared by S.V. Ozere, the Legal Adviser to the delegation. That part of this report gives article by article a summary of the issues, and the reasons for the arti­cles taking the particular form they have.

44. One part of the treaty - the Annex and the Protocol - is not referred to in the attached notes and some comment here is necessary.

45. The Annex lists the particular species that Japan has agreed to abstain from fishing, and that we and the United States have agreed to continue to conserve. Annex, paragraph 2 refers to the Behring Sea question, as does also the Protocol.

46. The Behring Sea issue did not come up until the whole treaty had been drafted. As the conference was drawing to a close, it suddenly became confronted with a major question - namely the intermingling of salmon stocks in the Behring Sea, the stocks going to Asia and to North America respectively. The winds of the Behring Sea did not, however, ventilate our brains on this issue. It was late. There was fear of the unknowns on the part of both the Americans and the Japanese. The Japanese knew the fishery in the area more intimately than anyone else and knew much about the intermingling of the stocks. With the loss of their fisheries in Kam­chatka, with the Russians imprisoning any Japanese fishermen found anywhere up to fifty miles off their coasts, the Japanese wanted a substantial area in the Behring Sea to fish for the Asiatic-bound salmon. Neither we nor the Americans knew any­thing of the migratory routes or of the intermingling of the Asiatic and Alaskan salmon in the Behring Sea. The Americans wished to hold the Japanese off as far as possible from Alaska to ensure that they would not trap the runs of red salmon going to Bristol Bay. A compromise was needed and it had to be geographical, a corridor, a zone or a line.

47. We pleaded for a corridor, an area of no-fishing in the middle of the Behring Sea where the stocks intermingle, with the Japanese fishing on the left of the corri­dor, taking salmon as they headed out for Asia, and the Americans on the right taking salmon as they headed out for Alaska. In the end the conference did what it had set out not to do. It drew a line, the line specified in Annex, paragraph 2. (See official printed report of Tripartite Fisheries Conference, Pages 103-4 for Canadian Delegation's comment on the compromise.) The line sets out an area roughly from Alaska to 175°W longitude in which both Canada and Japan have agreed to abstain from fishing salmon.

48. The Japanese had argued cogently that if a line to be drawn it should be at 170°W This the Americans would not accept and the final compromise pleased neither. Nor did it please the United States State Department in Washington. In the last hours of the conference Herrington had to make several phone calls to Wash­ington as they sought some other solution. His delegation of industrial advisers had all returned to the United States and some of them, too, had to be phoned. Only at noon on the day of the signing of the final document did he receive final consent from the State Department - with their non-committal statement that they would sanction the line if it were approved by Mr. Sebald, the United States Political Adviser in Japan. He did approve and Herrington was able to be present for the signing at 4 P.M.

49. Because all three parties disliked the idea of any geographical zone, a proto­col was added to the treaty to draw attention to the unique nature of this problem. It was agreed that the line should be only provisional, and the protocol instructs the Commission to put priority on the study of the intermingling of stocks in that area and to recommend other appropriate action to the governments. Should the com­mission fail to make a recommendation, the matter may be referred to a special committee of three disinterested persons, no one of whom shall be a National of a contracting party, for the determination of the matter.

50. This final solution was satisfactory to us. Under the terms of the treaty we had to abstain from fishing salmon in the Behring Sea although other species may be taken if our fishermen wish to go so far afield. The study of the intermingling may well prove, however, that there is interconnection between salmon stocks in the Gulf of Alaska and in the Behring Sea. If this is so proven, the United States can no longer ask us to abstain from salmon fishing in the Behring Sea itself. (See Article IV Proviso No. 3.)

Treaty Procedure

51. It will be noted that at the final plenary session the heads of the delegations did not sign the draft convention itself. They signed only the Resolutions and Requests. One of these resolutions is a recommendation to the governments that the draft convention be considered and approved by them. When this is done the Con­vention will be signed in Tokyo.

52. This arrangement was made because the Japanese Peace Treaty has not yet been ratified and Japan is unable to sign a draft fisheries convention until her sover­eignty is restored. The necessary ratification of the Peace Treaty is not simply by Canada and the United States but by the majority of the signatory countries. The draft fisheries convention need not, therefore, come before the Canadian Parliament in the spring of 1952 since the Peace Treaty is unlikely to be ratified until later in the year.²⁴

²² Voir le document 956./See Document 956.

²³ Note marginale :/Marginal note:
Or else the Japanese have learned U.S. obstructing tactics. C.S.A.R[itchie]

²⁴ Pour la Convention intemationale concernant les pêcheries hautières de l'océan pacifique nord voir Canada, Recueil des traités, 1953, N° 3.
For the International Convention for the High Seas Fisheries of the North Pacific Ocean, see Canada, Treaty Series, 1953, No. 3.