Word: matsuoka
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...Matsuoka resigned from the Service. Some said he found diplomatic discipline galling to his lone-cat temperament, his American education a liability in a service dominated by Tokyo Imperial University graduates. True to form, he reappeared on a higher rung five months later, as director, later president, of that octopus, the South Manchuria Railway. The South Manchuria Railway was no mere private enterprise; half its money was Government money, its policies were the Government's. The Railway not only controlled some 1,300 kilometers of railroad, but operated steamships, harbors, coal mines, shale-oil plants, ironworks, chemical-fertilizer plants...
Campaign by Railroad. At 22 Yosuke Matsuoka went back to the country he had left at 13. He spent nearly two years studying Japanese and Chinese classics, passed his Foreign Service examinations brilliantly, was launched on almost two decades of diplomacy. By 1917 his fleetness of wit and tongue, his drive, brought him to be Secretary to Foreign Minister Count Shimpei Goto; the next year he was Secretary to Japan's first commoner Premier, Takashi Hara. In 1919 he was a Japanese delegate to the Paris Peace Conference...
...fourth son of one Sanjuro Matsuoka and a woman who at 90 still lives in the Yamaguchi countryside. The story goes that Yosuke Matsuoka's family is of the Choshu clan-one of the two daimiates, or fiefs, of western Japan (the other is Satsuma), which less than 20 years before his birth had led in the destruction of Japan's feudalistic shogunate, and which emerged dominant in the Japanese Army. Whatever the truth about this glowing connection, Mr. Matsuoka speaks of himself proudly as a Choshu...
Campaign by Talk. Having furthered Japanese imperialist expansion in Manchuria and North China, Yosuke Matsuoka was just the man to explain to the world Japan's case after Japan seized Manchuria in 1931. He was sent as chief delegate to the Plenary Session of the League of Nations, which was considering the Lytton Report on the China-Japan conflict. There he conducted a dramatic rearguard campaign in a series of unconventional, eloquent, unrehearsed speeches in which he dragged in even Christ...
...Matsuoka's ingenious explanation to the democracies included the fact that there could be no such thing as a war between Japan and China because there was no such thing as China. "It is a conglomeration of disunited nations and hostile chieftains." The 43 nations voted to condemn Japan; Siam, the 44th, abstained. Mr. Matsuoka gathered his papers, stalked out, his suite scuttling after him. His arguments had failed to convince, but Japan got away with the Manchuria grab and the note he set at Geneva was echoed later by Italy over Ethiopia and by Germany over the Rhineland...