Shigenori Tōgō (東郷茂徳 Tōgō Shigenori) (Korean: 박무덕, Hanja: 朴茂德, Park Moo-Duk, 10 December 1882 - 23 July 1950) was Minister of Foreign Affairs for Japan at both the start and the end of the Japanese-American conflict during World War II. He also served as Minister of Greater East Asia in 1941, and assumed the same position, renamed the Minister for Greater East Asia, in 1945.
Throughout the war, Tōgō was among those who doubted that Japan could succeed in a war with the United States. Towards the end, he was one of the chief proponents for acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which, he felt, contained the best conditions for peace Japan could hope to be offered. Up until the last, he hoped for favorable terms from the Soviet Union. At Tōgō's suggestion, no official response was made to the Declaration at first, though a censored version was released to the Japanese public, while Tōgō waited to hear from Moscow. Unfortunately, many Allied leaders interpreted this silence as a rejection of the Declaration, and so bombing was allowed to continue.
Tōgō was one of the Cabinet Ministers who advocated Japanese surrender in the summer of 1945, and several days after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this action was finally taken.
When the war against the United States was decided, he disliked pressing the responsibility of the failure of diplomacy against others, and signed the document of the declaration of war by his responsibility. He became the defendant of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, as a war criminal for that. He was sentenced to 20 years for war crime charges and died of sickness from his confinement in prison.
A volume of his memoirs was published poshumously under the title "The Cause of Japan", which was edited by his former defence counsel Ben Bruce Blakeney.
Tōgō was of Korean descent, whose ancestor was a potter, Park Pyeong-ui (박평의 1558~1623) who was abducted to Japan during the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–1598) by Hideyoshi Toyotomi.[1] He was the creator of Satsuma ware which has been regarded as one of Japanese representative porcelains along with Yi Sam-pyeong's Arita ware.[2] Tōgō's original surname was Park, a Korean surname but his father reportedly purchased the surname, Tōgō, when Shigenori was five.[3]
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Teijiro Toyoda |
Minister for Foreign
Affairs of Japan Oct 1941 – Sept 1942 |
Succeeded by Hideki Tōjō |
| Preceded by Kantaro Suzuki |
Minister for Foreign
Affairs of Japan Apr 1945 – Aug 1945 |
Succeeded by Mamoru Shigemitsu |
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