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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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liberal and so modern that one thought there was too large a stake in Japan of friendliness toward America and that they had gotten too much from the USA in the way of education, support and sympathetic understanding toward their aspirations for, what I truly believed, was a more republican form of government, to turn against us. I would have supposed that the Japanese did not have any animus toward the USA unless we interfered with them in their conquest of China, which I understood. I got their idea about the East Asia co-prosperity program of which Japan was to be the leader and the dominating influence. I understood what they were talking about. In a world where they had observed other imperialistic expansion with increasing great wealth and power to individual members of a nation, one could see where they got the idea. It wasn't a totally new idea, except that it should be led by Japan and not by France, or England, or some other European power.

Curiously, my own wishful thinking blinded me to the idea that they might have America in mind too as perhaps the chief element that would be a leader of any prosperity in Asia. I don't know to this day when they first got up their animus to the USA, but I never had believed it. I assumed when they joined the German alliance, which Italy had also joined, that they had enlisted on that side of the great world war and that they expected to profit by it. Undoubtedly they could enormously profit in trade with Germany, as the great





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