National Affairs: Ten Years After

“Nobody wanted to volunteer forthe odious duty,” wrote a Japanese diplomat about the surrender on the Missouri. “The Prime Minister . . . was considered unsuitable because he was the Emperor’s uncle . . . [The] Vice Premier . . . shunned the ordeal. Finally, the mission was assigned to Foreign Minister Shigemitsu.” He was the little Japanese who stumped into history ten years ago this week, grotesque in frock coat and topper amid the tieless suntans of MacArthur’s conquerors, to sign the surrender papers and take his nation’s disgrace upon his bowed shoulders. One U.S. general recalled: “The Japanese plenipotentiary had a little trouble with the pen.”

This week Mamoru Shigemitsu, 68, once more Foreign Minister of Japan, is in the U.S. to discuss questions of foreign policy and mutual defense. After ten years, it was time, said he in San Francisco, “to wash out any trace of that unfortunate war.” The position of Mamoru Shigemitsu, despite the past, was that of a friend. His road to Washington had many a twist.

“No Doubt Where He Stands.” Son of a scholar of Chinese classics, law graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, Shigemitsu grew up through the Japanese Foreign Service. He believed Japan should control important parts of China, but somehow thought the conquest could be achieved without coming into conflict with the U.S. Shigemitsu served in London, in Berlin and in Portland, Ore., and was a member of the Japanese delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in Versailles. As Minister to China (1931-33), Shigemitsu unaffectedly supported the Japanese invasions. His specious argument: “China is not properly a nation or a state.” One day in Shanghai, a Korean patriot hurled a homemade grenade at a group of Japanese officials, and Mamoru Shigemitsu lost a leg.

Promoted to serve as ambassador to Russia, then to Great Britain, Shigemitsu ineffectively opposed the runaway Japanese expansion into the Pacific that led to the crash of Pearl Harbor. He opposed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. In war-torn (1941) London Winston Churchill wrote of Shigemitsu: “His whole attitude throughout was most friendly . . . We have no doubt where he stands.”

“The Traces of Defeat.” Back home after Pearl Harbor, Shigemitsu supported Japan’s “holy war,” became Foreign Minister in 1943. After the war began to go badly for Japan, he tried to negotiate a peace. Unable to make his colleagues face reality, he did not carry his opposition to the honorable point of resigning his job. In April 1946 Shigemitsu was hauled up before a war crimes tribunal for his associations with To jo & Co., and was later sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment; he served 4½ years.

Two months after Shigemitsu was de-purged, he was elected president of a new conservative party, the Progressives, which he led to the second strongest position in the Diet. Last winter Shigemitsu helped another conservative politician, Ichiro Hatoyama, form the big Democratic Party and win power. Shigemitsu got the job of Foreign Minister, and defined his objectives for his people: “It is our resolve to eliminate the traces of defeat, perfect a system of self-defense, achieve economic self-support, eradicate social unrest, and unite ourselves.” To accomplish such a task, Shigemitsu knew that Japan would need the friendship and help of the U.S.

Flying on to Washington last week for talks with Vice President Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford. Shigemitsu had a list of goals: 1) release of 210 Japanese war criminals still held by the U.S.; 2) cuts in Japan’s share of Japan-U.S. joint defense costs; 3) increase of Japan’s trade with Communist China. His fourth and most important objective: he hoped that his talks in Washington would increase his political prestige inside Japan.

Arriving in Washington with a gift-load of cloisonne vases, obis and brocades, his comely daughter Hanako at his side, Mamoru Shigemitsu posed for photographers, leaning heavily on his cane. Ten years after his “odious duty” aboard the Missouri, Shigemitsu proclaimed that he would “reaffirm in unmistakable terms the enduring friendship that now happily exists between Japan and the U.S.”

It is a measure of the weakness of the U.S. position in neutralist-minded Japan that the U.S. has to count Mamoru Shigemitsu as one of its most effective friends.