45 - Shirasu Jirō (1902–1985): A Complicated and Enigmatic Personality

Summary

INTRODUCTION

SHIRASU JIRŌ was an able and influential Japanese who had studied at Cambridge in the 1920s when Britain and Japan continued to have friendly relations. He saw these relations deteriorate until Britain and Japan were at war. After his return to Japan, he became first a journalist and then a businessman involved in trade between Japan and Europe and Japan and America. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of hostilities, he gave up business and spent the war years as a farmer, but maintained a close relationship with Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaō and Yoshida Shigeru. Following the end of the war, he became an important link between the Japanese government and the office of the Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP).

Shirasu was taller than the average Japanese and had a handsome appearance. He was regarded as ‘a perfect example of the Oriental gentleman’. At the same time he aroused the antipathy of some who saw him as an ‘eminence grise’ or Japanese Rasputin. Shirasu had a complicated and contradictory personality who played his part in both peace and war.

CAREER UP TO 1941

Shirasu Jirō was born on 17 February 1902 as the second son of Shirasu Fumihira, a wealthy industrialist, in Ashiya, a suburb of Kobe. Shirasu Fumihira as a young man had studied in America and Germany and had made a success of his cotton textile business. Shirasu Jirō was sent to study at the Kobe First Middle School. He was then sent abroad and entered Clare College in Cambridge. According to his school friends, Shirasu had a violent temper. In later life he is reputed to have said: ‘I was such a bad boy that I was exiled to the island of Britain.’

According to Clare College records, Shirasu entered the college on 19 April 1923 where he read medieval European history. Among his fellow students were Anthony H. Milward, who later became chief executive of British European Airways, and Alfred W. Franklin, who became president of the British Society for Medical History. He also met Robert Cecil Byng who became the 7^th Earl of Strafford and who became a life-long friend.