Backdrop: rumors of military assistance

At the Majestic Hotel in Addis Ababa on August 1, the Osaka Mainichi & Tokyo Nichi Nichi sponsored a roundtable discussion, ‘Ethiopia in Danger’. Araya, Heruy, and thirteen other prominent Ethiopian officials attended, as did Iwabuchi Yosikazu. Yamauchi Masao, well-versed in Amharic, acted as chair. Iwabuchi, a correspondent for the Osaka Mainichi, took charge of the reception, and the 26-year-old Shoji recorded the proceedings. Although arranged in secret, British, American, and German journalists came to the hotel seeking information.

Meanwhile, rumors continued to move beyond the facts of Ethio-Japanese relations. On August 2, reports claimed that demonstrators in rome had carried placards which had insultingly placed the Fascist littorio on the Japanese flag. Pompeo Aloisi, head of the Italian delegation at Geneva, quickly denounced these rumors as baseless.

The Soviets and Italians stepped up their symbolic complaints about the neomer cantilist nature of Japan's economic policy and that Japan had long been supplying arms to Ethiopia. In early August, Italy again inserted the racial argument into the armaments discussion, claiming that certain European states were betraying white civilization by supplying arms to Ethiopia. Further, according to the accusations, the Japanese had opened an official trading agency at Aden, which was selling munitions and textiles. The world's press joined Italy's to print reports from london and elsewhere on supposed Japanese arms shipments to Ethiopia. These extravagant worries about Japan's sending weapons, military advisers, and volunteers to Ethiopia, however, had no basis in reality.