The State Department's growing preoccupation with the belligerence of Japan compelled the US Consul General in Batavia, Erle Dickover, to respond to nervous inquiries concerning Japan's commercial activities in the Dutch East Indies. In early 1939,he sent several elaborate reports to Washington,in which he detailed the scope of Japan's economic enterprise in the Dutch East Indies.The Consul General described in great detail the more than “one hundred Japanese corporations” doing business in Java,Sumatra,Celebes (Sulawesi),and some of the smaller islands. He also informed his superiors in Washington that Japanese companies leased approximately 380,000 acres of land throughout the Indonesian archipelago for the purpose of cultivating rubber,palm oil,coffee,tea,and coconuts.

In a similar vein, Dickover discussed the presence of approximately 2,000 Japanese fishing and pearling vessels operating in the region. He conceded that he had little doubt that Japan's extensive commercial fleet sailing in between the thousands of islands of the archipelago, manned by capable Japanese crews of “natural-born” fishermen and pearl divers, possessed an enormous “military value.”These ships had most certainly “charted every foot of the waters of the archipelago, each shifting shoal and every submerged rock, for the Japanese Navy.” In order to illustrate Dutch perceptions of Japan's shrewd economic infiltration of the Indonesian archipelago, he quoted a journalist in Makassar,who had written in the pages of the Java Bode on January 6, 1939, that Europeans should never forget that the Japanese tended to pursue their objectives in a single-minded fashion.Employing hackneyed Western stereotypes about supposedly inscrutable Asians,the Java Bode reporter asserted that the goal of the Japanese in the Netherlands East Indies was to herd Europeans “out the front door with long faces,” while they entered via the back door “with sphinx-like smiles.” Once the Japanese had settled inside the house, he concluded that it might be impossible “to drive them out again.” What he did not mention, however,was that the overall Japanese population in the Dutch East never exceeded 7,000 people at its peak in 1927 and gradually declined thereafter.Thus, he had created the impression that the Japanese presence in the archipelago was much greater than it actually was.