60 J.-A. PEMBERTON
year, that he had attended the second meeting of the Comité d’études
des problèmes du Pacifique and had found it ‘exceedingly interesting.’^185
Bonnet’s interest in the committee was very likely piqued by his par-
ticipation in the LON’s Mission of Educational Experts to China in
November and December 1931, a mission which had come about as a
result of a Chinese request for the League’s assistance in the reorgan-
isation of the education in China. Bonnet had been sent to China by
the ICIC with a view to exploring the possibility of closer collaboration
between China and Geneva in the intellectual and cultural spheres.^186
Following what he told Shotwell was as an ‘extremely interesting but, as
one might well guess, difficult visit’ and partly as a consequence ICIC’s
policy of political neutrality (or perhaps what is better described in this
instance as its policy of political even-handedness), Bonnet spent a week
in Tokyo where he consulted with Japan’s foreign and education minis-
ters, representatives of its national committee on intellectual cooperation
and its League of Nations’ association and various other dignitaries.^187
In any case, as Bonnet also told Shotwell, Bonnet found the meeting
of the Comité d’études so interesting that he felt impelled to place an
office within the confines of the IIIC, the offices of which were located
in the rue de Montpensier wing of the Palais Royal. These offices had
been loaned to the IIIC by the French state for so long as the institute
existed.^188
Shotwell had an involvement with the IPR that dated back to its
formative stages: he was among ‘forty-one well-informed people on
international and Pacific affairs’ who met at the Yale Club in New York
on February 22, 1925, and who spent the afternoon considering the
(^185) Henri Bonnet to James T. Shotwell, 3 February 1932, Conférence des institutions
pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales, 1er octobre 1931–31 mars, 1932, AG
1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA.
(^186) ‘Note,’ Bulletin de la Coopération Intellectuelle 1, no. 13 (1932): 573–5; and ‘La
Coopération Intellectuelle et la Chine,’ Bulletin de la Coopération Intellectuelle 1, no. 13
(1932): 585–6.
(^187) Bonnet to Shotwell, 3 February 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA, and Bulletin de la
Coopération Intellectuelle 1, no. 13 (1932), 575.
(^188) Bonnet to Shotwell, 3 February 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA. See also ‘Appendix
5: National Councils and Secretaries of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Problems in
the Pacific, 1936, 455. Note that according to the record of the Yosemite conference, the
address of the secretary general of the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique was as
follows: 2 rue du Four, Paris.