170 Ë War and Dénouement
had steadily declined after the death of Piłsudski, its political sponsor, in 1935, and
the new orientation did not stop its slide.
Despite these circumstances and dierences in political orientation, Poland and
Japan appear to have moved even closer than before in intelligence collaboration.
This was all the more surprising in view of the Anti-Comintern Pact, in which Japan
and Germany, Poland’s potential foe, joined forces and treated the Promethean move-
ment as something to be watchful over. Simultaneously, the German-Japanese press
agency (Agence Telepress) based in Geneva was also trying to outdo the Promethean
press agency (O nor).³Japan tried courting some Promethean activists at the time (see
p. 163), but it did not succeed in the end. Although Japan began working, if tenta-
tively, with the Promethean movement, its oers of nancial assistance were rejected
by Poland on the grounds that, in the Polish government’s view, Japan was more inter-
ested in using the movement for political subversion and espionage than in support-
ing its political goals.⁴Poland had every reason to discuss the Promethean movement
with Japan in order to prevent the latter from usurping it and, if possible, to detach
Japan from Germany and draw it closer. At the same time, Japan had its own interests
in the Promethean movement as an intelligence tool. In the autumn of 1937, Japanese
foreign minister Koki Hirota (1878–1948) instructed the foreign ministry’s legations ̄
in Europe to organize an extensive intelligence network against the Soviet Union. Al-
though one can know the content of this instruction only indirectly, it appears that Hi-
rota and the Japanese ambassador in Warsaw, Shuichi Sak ̄ o (1887–1949), exchanged ̄
views on Japan’s political use of the Promethean movement. Sak ̄o cautioned Hirota
that although Poland was extraordinarily friendly toward Japan (and that if war broke
out between Japan and the USSR, Poland would use the Promethean movement to its
full capacity to dismember the Soviet Union), Poland’s friendly attitudes toward Japan
would not be guaranteed in the event of a Soviet-Japanese rapprochement. In the end,
Hirota urged the Japanese legations to use cultural organizations and exchanges as a
cover for intelligence.⁵
This secret instruction appears to have been intercepted, or at least its content
became known to Moscow. On 26 October 1937, the Soviet ambassador to Poland com-
plained that Japan and Poland were forming an anti-Soviet bloc under the guise of cul-
tural conventions.⁶In any event, Ambassador Sak ̄o appears to have soon concluded
that cultural conventions were too limited for Japan’s purposes. Therefore, accord-
ing to his 11 May 1938 telegram to Hirota, Sak ̄o sent his assistant, Masutaro Inoue, ̄
on a “strictly personal basis,” to the representatives of the Promethean movement
3 CAW I.303.4.5707 (February-March 1938 reports).
4 See Mikulicz,Prometeizm, 266–68.
5 GGSK, B.1.0.0.Po/R (11 May 1938 secret dispatch from Warsaw to Tokyo in four parts). See also Hiroaki
Kuromiya and Paweł Libera, “Notatka Włodzimierza Bączkowskiego na temat współpracy polsko-
japońskiej wobec ruchu prometejskiego (1938).”Zeszyty historyczne, v. 169 (2009), 127.
6 Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw, Poland, MSZ, syg. 6653, 20.