Mamoru Shigemitsu

Mamoru Shigemitsu (重光 葵, Shigemitsu Mamoru; July 29, 1887 – January 26, 1957) was a Japanese diplomat and politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs three times during and after World War II and as Deputy Prime Minister. As a civilian plenipotentiary representing the Japanese government, Shigemitsu cosigned the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on board the battleship USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.

Shigemitsu was born in what is now part of the city of Bungo-ōno, Ōita Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Law School of Tokyo Imperial University in 1911 and immediately entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After World War I, he served in numerous overseas diplomatic assignments, including in Germany and the United Kingdom and briefly as consul at the Japanese consulate in Seattle, Washington, United States.

Following the Mukden Incident in 1931, Shigemitsu was active in various western capitals, attempting to reduce alarm at Japanese military activities in Manchuria.

During the First Shanghai Incident of 1932, he was successful in enlisting the aid of western nations in brokering a ceasefire between the Kuomintang Army and the Imperial Japanese Army. On April 29, 1932, while attending a celebration for the birthday of Emperor Hirohito in Shanghai, a Korean independence activist, Yoon Bong-Gil, threw a bomb at a reviewing stand killing General Yoshinori Shirakawa and wounding several others, including Shigemitsu. Shigemitsu lost his right leg in the attack and walked with an artificial leg and cane for the rest of his life.

Shigemitsu later became ambassador to the Soviet Union, and in 1938, he negotiated a settlement of the Russo-Japanese border clash at Changkufeng Hill. He then became Japan's ambassador to the United Kingdom during a period of deteriorating Anglo-Japanese relations, most notably the Tientsin incident of 1939, which pushed Japan to the brink of war with the United Kingdom. He was recalled in June 1941.

Shigemitsu was highly critical of the foreign policies of Yōsuke Matsuoka, especially the Tripartite Pact, which he warned would further strengthen anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. Shigemitsu spent two weeks in Washington, DC, on the way back from Britain and conferred with Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura to attempt to arrange for direct face-to-face negotiations between Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Shigemitsu's many attempts to stave off World War II angered the militarists in Tokyo, and only two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was sidelined with an appointment as ambassador to the Japanese-sponsored Reorganized National Government of China. In China, Shigemitsu argued that the success of the proposed Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere depended on the equal treatment of China and the other Asian nations by Japan.^{[page needed]}

On April 20, 1943, in a move that was viewed as a sign that Japan might be preparing for a collapse of the Axis powers, Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō replaced Foreign Minister Masayuki Tani with Shigemitsu, who had been steadfast in his opposition to the militarists. Shigemitsu was thus foreign minister during the Greater East Asia Conference. The American press often referred to him in headlines as "Shiggy".