Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (外務省, Gaimushō) has been the central organ of Japanese diplomacy since the Meiji Restoration. Established on August 15, 1869 under the Dajōkan system, it is one of the few Japanese ministries never to have changed its name, and has its seat at Kasumigaseki in Tokyo. Its first great task was revising the unequal treaties of the bakumatsu era; in the twentieth century it increasingly contested control of China policy with the military.

In the 1930s the ministry's room for manoeuvre narrowed steadily. Japan left the League of Nations in 1933 after the Manchurian Incident; in September 1940 Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke concluded the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, and in April 1941 the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact. Negotiations with the United States collapsed in 1941, and the embassy in Washington delivered Japan's final memorandum on December 7 after the attack on Pearl Harbor had begun — a delay whose responsibility was long examined after the war. In 1940 Sugihara Chiune, acting consul at Kaunas in Lithuania, issued transit visas to large numbers of Jewish refugees against instructions from Tokyo.

During the Pacific War, the ministry was responsible for managing Japan's international relations, including diplomatic communications with neutral and Allied powers, but its authority was cut further. The Greater East Asia Ministry, created on November 1, 1942, took over relations with occupied territories and Asian states; Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori had resigned that September in protest. Tani Masayuki and then Shigemitsu Mamoru succeeded him, Shigemitsu promoting the Greater East Asia Conference of November 1943. The ministry played a pivotal role in the endgame of the war: receiving and translating the Potsdam Declaration, participating in cabinet deliberations on surrender, and coordinating with Allied powers through neutral channels. Tōgō, foreign minister again from April 1945, sounded out Soviet mediation through Ambassador Satō Naotake while advocating acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration; the notes of August 10 and 14 were transmitted through the governments of Switzerland and Sweden.

The ministry prepared for the Instrument of Surrender, which Shigemitsu signed for the government, alongside General Umezu Yoshijirō for Imperial General Headquarters, aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Tōgō and Shigemitsu were thus key figures in Japan's path to peace. Under the occupation Japan's diplomatic rights were suspended and the ministry worked mainly through the Central Liaison Office, set up in August 1945 to deal with GHQ. Normal foreign relations resumed when the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect on April 28, 1952. The ministry's Diplomatic Archives at Azabudai in Tokyo preserve and make public the records of this period.