Motono becomes Foreign Minister of Japan

On 21 November 1916 Viscount Ichirō Motono, the Japanese ambassador in Petrograd, became Foreign Minister in the government of Field Marshal Masatake Terauchi. The same day the prime minister gave up the foreign ministry, which he had headed on an interim basis since forming his cabinet on 9 October. The British chronology of the war separates these events: it dates Terauchi’s surrender of the ministry to 20 November and Motono’s appointment to 21 November. According to the Japanese official gazette Kanpō, whose special edition of 21 November announced both decisions, they took place simultaneously. For the time being the prime minister kept the second of his additional posts, the finance ministry.

Motono was 54. He was born in 1862 in the Saga domain on the island of Kyushu. His father was one of the founders of the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. At the age of only eleven he went to Paris to study, and later he studied law in Lyon, where he received his doctorate in 1889. On returning home he joined the foreign ministry, was secretary to the minister Munemitsu Mutsu, lectured on international law and translated the Japanese civil code into French. He was then minister to Belgium, and in 1899 he represented Japan at the first peace conference in The Hague. From 1901 he was minister in Paris, where in 1905, through the French Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé, he received the first soundings about peace with Russia. In the same year he sat as an arbitrator in a dispute before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

The most important chapter of his career, however, was Russia. In 1906, a year after the Russo-Japanese War, he became minister in St Petersburg, and in 1908 ambassador. For ten years he turned former enemies into partners. He negotiated the agreements of 1907, 1910 and 1912, in which the two states divided Manchuria and Mongolia into spheres of influence, and on 3 July 1916 he signed in Petrograd the convention on the Far East together with a secret alliance concerning China. For these services he was made a baron in 1907 and a viscount on 14 July 1916. His successor in Petrograd was Kōsai Uchida, a former foreign minister.

The choice of Motono suited the character of Terauchi’s government, which did not rest on the parties. The new minister was a career diplomat with no party ties, like Kikujirō Ishii, who had headed the ministry in the last year of the government of Shigenobu Ōkuma, but unlike his predecessor, the leader of the Dōshikai party, Takaaki Katō. In him Tokyo was also betting on close cooperation with Russia, one of the main ideas of Field Marshal Aritomo Yamagata, the prime minister’s patron. During Motono’s term, in February 1917, Japan obtained from Britain, and soon afterwards also from France and Russia, secret assurances of support for its claims to the German rights in Shantung and the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator. In return the British received, among other things, Japanese destroyers in the Mediterranean. In the autumn of 1917 Ishii, sent to Washington, concluded an agreement with the United States concerning China.

The revolution in Russia, however, wrecked the policy on which Motono had staked his whole career. After the Bolsheviks seized power the minister was among the most ardent supporters of armed intervention in Siberia. This was opposed by the leader of the Seiyūkai party, Takashi Hara, who sat on the Provisional Council on Foreign Policy set up in June 1917, and without the consent of the Americans Terauchi would not make up his mind. According to Japanese biographers it was illness, stomach cancer, that forced him to resign on 23 April 1918, although a lost dispute over intervention was also in the background, and his place was taken by Shinpei Gotō. He died on 17 September 1918, a few weeks after Japan had begun the Siberian intervention.