Ishii Kikujirō

Ishii Kikujirō

Shishaku Ishii Kikujirō ( Japanese 石井 菊 次郎 ; * April 24, 1866 in today's Mobara , Chiba Prefecture ; †  May 25, 1945 in Tokyo , Japanese Empire) was a Japanese diplomat and politician who served as Foreign Minister of the Japanese Empire from 1915 to 1916 .

Life

Ishii Kikujirō graduated from the Faculty of Law of the Imperial University of Tokyo and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1891 . He was initially an attaché at the embassy in France and in 1896 consul in Incheon . In 1897 he moved to the embassy in the Empire of China as an embassy secretary , where he experienced the Boxer Rebellion , in which he himself participated as a member of the 5th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army . In 1900 he returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and became head of the communication section and in 1902 head of the communication, personnel and information department before becoming head of the trade department in 1904. In 1907 he was posted to San Francisco and Vancouver after an increasingly anti-Japanese sentiment arose in the United States and Canada . He succeeded in negotiating an agreement according to which Japanese workers should not be issued a passport if they obviously wanted to emigrate to the USA. In 1908 he became Vice Foreign Minister and held this post in the first Saionji cabinet and in the second Katsura cabinet until August 1911. On June 13, 1911, he was awarded the Order of the Holy Treasure and on August 24, 1911 as a baron (Danshaku) in raised the hereditary nobility ( Kazoku ) .

1912 took over Ishii, succeeding Kurino Shinichirō the post of ambassador to France and remained there until his replacement by Matsui Keishiro 1915. He was then on 13 October 1915 as the successor to Okuma Shigenobu to foreign minister in the second cabinet Okuma appointed, which he belonged to the end of Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu's tenure on October 9, 1916. After leaving the Cabinet, he was raised to Vice Count (Shishaku) and elected to the House of Lords ( Kizokuin ) .

Vice-Count Ishii Kikujirō and US Secretary of State R. Lansing after signing the Lansing-Ishii Agreement in Washington, DC on November 2, 1917

Under his leadership, the Lansing-Ishii Agreement with the United States of America , named after him and the then US Secretary of State Robert Lansing , was passed on November 2, 1917 . With this agreement, the two powers agreed on their interests in China. Subsequently, in February 1918, he replaced Yoshimaro Satō as ambassador to the United States, but in 1919 he handed this post back to Shidehara Kijūrō , who served as his deputy foreign minister during his tenure as foreign minister. During this time he tried to reduce the tension between the White Movement and the Bolsheviks as part of the Siberian Intervention . He was a member of the Japanese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and dealt with negotiations on the border between Germany and Poland . He then acted as a Japanese delegate to the League of Nations between 1920 and 1927 and worked as a reporter for questions about Danzig. During this time he wrote the "Ishii Report", named after him, on the protection of the Free City of Danzig to the League Council of November 17, 1920.

Most recently, Ishii replaced Matsui Keishirō as ambassador to France in October 1920 and remained there until December 1927, when Adachi Mineichirō succeeded him. During this time, between April and May 1922, he took part in the Genoa Conference, which dealt with the restoration of the international financial and economic systems that had been shattered by the First World War . In February 1927, he also took part in the Geneva Fleet Conference, which however disbanded without result. In 1929 he was appointed a member of the Privy Council ( Sūmitsu-in ) , of which he was a member until his death in 1945. In 1933 he represented Japan as a member of the World Economic Council and visited France and Great Britain in 1937 . In the Privy Council he was one of the critics of the three-power pact signed on September 27, 1940 between the Japanese Empire, the German Empire and the Kingdom of Italy , known as the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis .

Kikujirō was allegedly killed in the third air raid on Tokyo on May 25, 1945 during a visit to the Meiji Shrine , which served as an air raid shelter for his neighborhood community ( Tonarigumi ) . His remains were not found.

Publications

• Manchoukuo and the Manchurian question , League of Nations Association of Japan, 1932
• Diplomatic Commentaries , Johns Hopkins Press, 1936

Background literature

• Sadao Asada: Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations: Historical Essays , p. 120 et al., University of Missouri Press, 2007, ISBN 0-8262-6569-3
• Thomas W. Burkman: Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914-1938 , p. 104 et al., University of Hawaii Press, 2008, ISBN 0-8248-2982-4
• Klaus Schlichtmann: Japan in the World: Shidehara Kijūrō, Pacifism, and the Abolition of War , p. 185 et al., Lexington Books, 2009, ISBN 0-7391-2675-X * Peter Berton: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1905-17: From enemies to allies , p. 100 et al., Routledge, 2013, ISBN 1-1365-8568-0
• Mayako Shimamoto, Koji Ito, Yoneyuki Sugita: Historical Dictionary of Japanese Foreign Policy , p. 125 et al., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, ISBN 1-4422-5067-4

Web links

Commons : Ishii Kikujirō  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Ishii Kikujirō in the online version of the Reich Chancellery Edition Files. Weimar Republic
• Entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica (online version)
• Entry in World War I Biographical Dictionary
• Entry in rulers.org
• The Governments of Japan 1885-1945

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Japan: Foreign Ministers
2. ↑ Christopher Arnander, Frances Wood: Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War , Pen and Sword, 2016, ISBN 1-4738-7503-X
3. ↑ Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz (eds.): Encyclopedia First World War . Schöningh, 2009, ISBN 978-3-506-76578-9 , pp. 594 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
4. ↑ Ludwig Denne: The Danzig problem in German foreign policy 1934-39 . L. Röhrscheid, 1959, p. 42 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Ishii is the family name, Kikujirō the first name.