Negative shows Andrei Gromyko, Russian Foreign Minister, voting at the beginning of the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference. He is putting his vote in a small wooden box with a hole slit in the top which is sitting on a table next to a podium from which the various delegates give their speeches while at the conference. Two unidentified men are standing at the table as well watching him vote and another man wearing a bowtie is standing just behind Gromyko. [Information provided by "The Oakland Tribune" Sept. 2-9, 1951]The Japanese Peace Treaty Conference was held at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco September 4-8, 1951. In 1945, the Opera House was also the place where the United Nations had come into existence. A total of 51 countries participated in this conference. The officially ended the war with Japan started when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. Some of the provisions of the treaty were: to end American occupation of Japan, make Japan pay some reparations for the war, and force it to comply with the peaceful wishes of other countries. The treaty allowed Japan to join the United Nations and rearm to a certain extent. Negotiations for the treaty had been going on for eleven months with John Foster Dulles as the primary force behind the negotions. The communists nations, primarily the Soviet Union, were not happy about the treaty and the fact that they were not involved in the negotiations. They vowed even before the conference opened to cause as much trouble as possible. The first order of business at the conference was to vote on a set of rules developed by the U.S. and Britain, the other sponsor of the treaty. The rules were designed to insure that the treaty would be signed by all Allied nations and prevent the Soviet Union from causing any major damage. The rules set limits on speeches and prevented any amendments from being added to the treaty (which the Russians wanted to do). Each delegate cast a ballot on the rules which is what Gromyko is doing in this photo. Naturally the rules were passed much to the Soviet's disgust. This was Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's first major defeat of the conference.