Motono resigns

On 23 April 1918 Viscount Ichirō Motono stepped down as Japan’s foreign minister, an office he had held since November 1916 in the government of Field Marshal Masatake Terauchi. On the same day Baron Shinpei Gotō became his successor. This is what the Japanese lists of ministers and the official gazette state, while the British chronology of the war dates the resignation to 21 April and the appointment to 22 April. The official reason was illness. The 56-year-old Motono was suffering from stomach cancer and was no longer able to run the ministry.

In the background, however, was a lost dispute over Siberia. After the Bolshevik revolution and the armistice on the Eastern Front, Britain and France urged Japan to send troops to the Russian Far East, re-establish a front against Germany and secure the huge depots of war material in Vladivostok. Motono, for ten years ambassador to Russia, was among the most ardent supporters of such an intervention, even without the consent of the United States. The General Staff and the Home Minister, Gotō, thought likewise. Opposed were the leader of the Seiyūkai party, Takashi Hara, and some members of the Advisory Council on Foreign Relations set up in 1917, and the influential genrō Field Marshal Aritomo Yamagata was also cautious. They believed that Japan could send troops only in agreement with Washington, and President Woodrow Wilson was at that time opposed to intervention. In the spring the council rejected the plan for an independent expedition. When Japanese and British sailors landed at Vladivostok on 5 April, it was only a limited action to protect their own nationals, not the beginning of the great operation Motono wanted.

Motono’s successor was one of the most colourful figures in Japanese politics. Gotō was 60. A doctor by training, he had made his name as head of the civil administration of Taiwan, where from 1898 he built railways, ports and a sanitary system, and then as the first president of the South Manchuria Railway. In Terauchi’s government he had been Home Minister since October 1916. His place at that ministry was now taken by the former vice-minister, Rentarō Mizuno. The new foreign minister shared his predecessor’s views on Russian affairs. In a speech on 27 April he said that Russia was like a machine temporarily broken down, which had to be repaired, and that Japan should support its reconstruction.

The change at the head of Japanese diplomacy therefore did not mean a change of course, but the decision to intervene was taken only in the summer, when the Americans, moved by the plight of the Czechoslovak Corps in Siberia, themselves proposed a joint expedition. In August 1918 Japan announced the start of the Siberian intervention and sent to Siberia many more soldiers than had been agreed with Washington. Motono died on 17 September 1918, a few weeks after it began. Gotō remained minister until the fall of Terauchi’s government at the end of September, after the great rice riots.