Mamoru Shigemitsu

• 1. Introduction

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  Mamoru Shigemitsu walked with a cane and an artificial right leg to the deck of a battleship on the 2nd of September 1945 and signed the document that ended Japan's war. The leg was gone because of a bomb thrown thirteen years earlier at a birthday celebration in Shanghai. Between that explosion and that signature lay a career that put him at the center of nearly every turning point in Japanese foreign policy across the most violent decades of the twentieth century.

  Shigemitsu spent years trying to stop a war he believed would destroy his country. He warned that the Tripartite Pact would fuel anti-Japanese feeling in the United States. He flew to Washington to arrange a face-to-face meeting between Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He argued from inside the Japanese government that Asian nations deserved equal treatment, not conquest.

  None of it worked. And when the war was over, the Allies put him on trial anyway. What happened next is the stranger part of the story.

• 2. A Life Built Abroad

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  Shigemitsu was born in what is now part of the city of Bungo-ono, in Oita Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Law School of Tokyo Imperial University in 1911 and walked straight into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs without a pause. From there, the postings multiplied: Germany, the United Kingdom, and a stint as consul at the Japanese consulate in Seattle, Washington.

  Those early years outside Japan shaped a diplomat who was fluent in the anxieties of the Western powers. After the Mukden Incident in 1931, that fluency became urgent. Shigemitsu moved through western capitals trying to calm fears about Japanese military moves in Manchuria, speaking to governments that were growing more alarmed with each passing month.

  His most striking early success came during the First Shanghai Incident of 1932, when he helped persuade western nations to broker a ceasefire between the Kuomintang Army and the Imperial Japanese Army. It was a measure of his standing that foreign governments listened. It was also, as events would prove, a preview of the limits of what one diplomat could accomplish.

• 3. The Bomb in Shanghai

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  On the 29th of April 1932, Shigemitsu attended a celebration marking Emperor Hirohito's birthday in Shanghai. A Korean independence activist named Yoon Bong-Gil threw a bomb at the reviewing stand. General Yoshinori Shirakawa was killed. Several others were wounded, Shigemitsu among them.

  Shigemitsu lost his right leg. For the rest of his life he walked with an artificial leg and a cane. That physical fact became, in a grim way, inseparable from his public identity: when photographs were taken of the surrender ceremony aboard the battleship in 1945, the cane was visible to anyone watching.

  The attack did not slow his career. He went on to become ambassador to the Soviet Union, and in 1938 he negotiated a settlement of the Russo-Japanese border clash at Changkufeng Hill. He then took on the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom during a period when Anglo-Japanese relations were deteriorating sharply, most notably because of the Tientsin incident of 1939, which pushed Japan to the brink of war with Britain. He was recalled to Japan in June 1941.

• 4. Opposing the Militarists

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  Shigemitsu was deeply critical of Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, and specifically of the Tripartite Pact that Matsuoka championed. Shigemitsu's argument was direct: the pact would harden anti-Japanese opinion in the United States at precisely the moment Japan needed American tolerance.

  Passing through Washington on his way back from Britain, he spent two weeks conferring with Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura, trying to arrange a direct meeting between Prime Minister Konoe and President Roosevelt. The effort came to nothing. Two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the militarists in Tokyo sidelined him with an appointment as ambassador to the Japanese-sponsored Reorganized National Government of China.

  Even from that post, Shigemitsu pressed his case. He argued that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere could only succeed if Japan treated China and the other Asian nations as equals rather than as subjects. On the 20th of April 1943, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo replaced Foreign Minister Masayuki Tani with Shigemitsu. The American press, covering a diplomat they found difficult to ignore, took to calling him "Shiggy" in headlines.

• 5. Signing the Surrender

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  From the 22nd of July 1944 to the 7th of April 1945, Shigemitsu held two cabinet posts simultaneously: Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Greater East Asia in the Kuniaki Koiso administration. He served again as Foreign Minister in August 1945 under Prime Minister Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, in the final weeks before the surrender.

  On the 2nd of September 1945, Shigemitsu boarded the battleship as the civilian plenipotentiary of the Japanese government. General Yoshijiro Umezu signed alongside him as the military representative. Together they put their names to the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.

  The Soviet Union then insisted that Shigemitsu be taken into custody by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. He was held in Sugamo Prison as an accused war criminal. Joseph Grew, the former United States ambassador to Japan, submitted a signed deposition on his behalf. The chief prosecutor, Joseph B. Keenan, objected. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East convicted Shigemitsu of waging an aggressive war and of failing to do enough to protect prisoners-of-war from inhumane treatment.

• 6. Trial, Prison, and Return

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  The tribunal convicted Shigemitsu, but the judges were candid about what they thought of him. Recognizing his sustained opposition to Japanese militarism and his documented protests against the treatment of prisoners-of-war, they handed down the lightest sentence given to anyone found guilty at the trial: seven years in prison.

  He was paroled in 1950. After the occupation of Japan ended, he formed a short-lived political party called Kaishinto, which merged with the Japan Democratic Party in 1954. In October 1952 he was elected to the Lower House of the Diet of Japan. By 1954 he was Deputy Prime Minister under Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, the leader of the Japan Democratic Party. When the party merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955, Shigemitsu kept the post, holding it until 1956.

  He also served concurrently as Foreign Minister from 1954 to 1956, a third and final time in that role. The arc from Sugamo Prison to Deputy Prime Minister took less than five years.

• 7. Japan's Return to the World

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  In April 1955, Shigemitsu represented Japan at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. The gathering marked the first time Japan had participated in an international conference since the League of Nations, a signal that the country's isolation was ending.

  That August, Shigemitsu led a high-level Japanese delegation to Washington to press for revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had been the treaty's primary architect, was not receptive. He told Shigemitsu plainly that any discussion of revision was "premature" because Japan lacked "the unity, cohesion, and capacity to operate under a new treaty arrangement." Shigemitsu returned to Japan without the revision he sought.

  In 1956, Shigemitsu addressed the United Nations General Assembly, pledging Japan's support for the founding principles of the organization and formally applying for membership. Japan became the UN's 80th member on the 18th of December 1956. That same year he traveled to Moscow in an attempt to normalize diplomatic relations and resolve the Kuril Islands dispute. The visit produced the Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956, a tangible result where the Washington mission had come up empty.

• 8. Final Days

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  In January 1957, a year after his Moscow visit, Shigemitsu died of a myocardial infarction at the age of 69. He died at his summer home in Yugawara, in Kanagawa Prefecture.

  The Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration he helped produce in 1956 remained, decades later, the governing framework for the still-unresolved dispute over the Kuril Islands.