Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

60 • CAIRO CONFERENCE
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CAIRO CONFERENCE. In November and December 1943, United
States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek met at
Cairo to discuss their nations’ war against Japan. Chiang pressed his
allies to launch an amphibious assault in the Bay of Bengal to coincide
with a Chinese intervention in Burma. Churchill was uninterested.
Roosevelt was sympathetic, although his sympathy did not
translate into any commitments on this score. Unable to offer anything
immediate to Chiang, Roosevelt instead assured the Chinese
leader that his nation would recover its territorial integrity following
Japan’s defeat. In a declaration that the three statesmen issued on 1
December, they emphasized their determination to expel Japan from
all territories it had “taken by violence and greed,” and the Allies further
specified that, “Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the
Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the
First World War in 1914, and that all the territory Japan has stolen
from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores,
shall be restored to the Republic of China.” They also promised that
Korea would become free and independent “in due course.” Although
silent on the future of Okinawa, this declaration put Japanese leaders
on notice that their enemies were driven by the objective of reducing
Japan territorially to the position it had occupied at the outset
of the Meiji era some 100 years earlier. See also PACIFIC WAR;
WORLD WAR II.
CALIFORNIA. California is connected to Asia and Japan by the geographic
proximity of the Pacific Ocean, and ports such as San Francisco
and Los Angeles have been hubs of Asian trade and immigration
since the 1850s when large numbers of Chinese and later
Japanese immigrated to the United States.
Formerly the Mexican territory of Alta California, California became
part of the United States in 1850, soon after the discovery of
gold and the end of the Mexican–American War. The Gold Rush attracted
people from all over the world to travel to California and find
their fortune in “the golden state.” Most people did not find a fortune,
but many stayed and transformed California into a state with a di-