Ernest Mason Satow

Sir Ernest Mason Satow GCMG, PC (30 June 1843 – 26 August 1929), was a British diplomat, scholar and Japanologist. He is better known in Japan, where he was known as Satō Ainosuke (Japanese: 佐藤 愛之助/薩道 愛之助), than in Britain or the other countries in which he served as a diplomat. He was a key figure in late 19th-century Anglo-Japanese relations.

Satow was influential in East Asia and Japan, particularly in the Bakumatsu (1853–1867) and Meiji (1868–1912) eras. He also served in China after the Boxer Rebellion (1900–1906), in Siam, Uruguay, and Morocco, and represented Britain at the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. In his retirement, he wrote A Guide to Diplomatic Practice. Now known as 'Satow's Guide to Diplomatic Practice', this manual is still widely used today, and has been updated several times by distinguished diplomats, notably Lord Gore-Booth. The sixth edition, edited by Sir Ivor Roberts, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, and is over 700 pages long.

Satow was born in Clapton, London, the son of Hans David Christoph Satow (born in Wismar, then under Swedish rule, naturalised British in 1846) and his English wife Margaret (née Mason). He was educated at Mill Hill School and University College London (UCL).

Satow was an exceptional linguist, an energetic traveller, a writer of travel guidebooks, a dictionary compiler, a mountaineer, a keen botanist (chiefly with Frederick Dickins) and a major collector of Japanese books and manuscripts on all kinds of subjects. Satow kept a diary for most of his adult life which amounts to 47 mostly handwritten volumes.

Ernest Satow is probably best known as the author of the book A Diplomat in Japan (based mainly on his diaries) which describes the years 1862–1869 when Japan was changing from rule by the Tokugawa shogunate to the restoration of Imperial rule. He was recruited by the Foreign Office straight out of university in London. Within a week of his arrival by way of China as a young student interpreter in the British Japan Consular Service, at age 19, the Namamugi Incident (Namamugi Jiken), in which a British merchant was killed on the Tōkaidō, took place on 21 August 1862. Satow was on board one of the British ships that sailed to Kagoshima in August 1863 to obtain the compensation demanded from the Satsuma clan's daimyō, Shimazu Hisamitsu, for the slaying of Charles Lennox Richardson. They were fired on by the Satsuma shore batteries and retaliated by bombarding Kagoshima.

In 1864, Satow was with the allied force (Britain, France, the Netherlands and the United States) that attacked Shimonoseki to enforce the right of passage of foreign ships through the narrow Kanmon Straits between Honshū and Kyūshū. Satow met Itō Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru of Chōshū for the first time just before the bombardment of Shimonoseki. He also had links with many other Japanese leaders, including Saigō Takamori of Satsuma (who became a friend), and toured the hinterland of Japan with A. B. Mitford and the cartoonist and illustrator Charles Wirgman.

Satow's rise in the consular service was due at first to his competence and zeal as an interpreter at a time when English was virtually unknown in Japan, as the Japanese government still communicated with the West in Dutch and available study aids were exceptionally few. Employed as a consular interpreter alongside Russell Robertson, Satow became a student of Rev. Samuel Robbins Brown, and an associate of Dr. James Curtis Hepburn, two noted pioneers in the study of the Japanese language. His Japanese language skills quickly became indispensable in the British Minister Sir Harry Parkes's negotiations with the failing Tokugawa shogunate and the powerful Satsuma and Chōshū clans, and the gathering of intelligence. He was promoted to full Interpreter and then Japanese Secretary to the British legation, and, as early as 1864, he started to write translations and newspaper articles on subjects relating to Japan. In 1869, he went home to England on leave, returning to Japan in 1870.

Satow was one of the founding members at Yokohama, in 1872, of the Asiatic Society of Japan whose purpose was to study the Japanese culture, history and language (i.e. Japanology) in detail. He lectured to the Society on several occasions in the 1870s, and the Transactions of the Asiatic Society contain several of his published papers. His 1874 article on Japan covering various aspects including Japanese Literature that appeared in the New American Cyclopædia was one of the first such authentic pieces written in any European language. The Society is still thriving today.