Short answers, pulled from the story.
Fumimaro Konoe was a Japanese aristocratic politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan twice: from June 1937 to January 1939 and from July 1940 to October 1941. He came from the Konoe family, the most senior branch of the ancient Fujiwara clan, and was the 29th head of that house.
Konoe's government sent additional military divisions to China after an initial truce following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, breaking the ceasefire and triggering full-scale war. He later rejected Chiang Kai-shek's peace overtures, opposed German mediation efforts after the fall of Nanjing, and issued statements declaring Japan would "reject" and "eradicate" Chiang's government rather than negotiate with it.
The Imperial Rule Assistance Association was a wartime mobilization organization founded by Konoe in 1940 under his second cabinet. It pressured Japan's political parties to dissolve into a single structure under Konoe's leadership, replacing the party system with a unified political order, though Konoe resisted calls to model it directly on the Nazi party.
Konoe resigned on the 16th of October 1941 after failing to convince war minister Hideki Tojo to withdraw Japanese troops from China and take the war option off the table. A military-imposed deadline for a diplomatic agreement had passed, Konoe told his cabinet at the Tekigaiso conference that he had no confidence in the war they were about to wage and could not lead it.
The Konoe Memorial was a formal report Konoe submitted to Emperor Hirohito on the 14th of February 1945. In it, he urged Hirohito to surrender to the Allied powers to prevent a communist revolution in Japan, citing the threat of communist agitators including Sanzo Nosaka (alias Okano), Soviet expansionism, and pro-Soviet elements within the Japanese government.
Fumimaro Konoe died on the 16th of December 1945 by swallowing potassium cyanide. He chose suicide the morning he was due to leave for Sugamo prison rather than face arrest on war crimes charges during the Allied occupation of Japan. His grave is at the Konoe clan cemetery at the temple of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto.