Toshio Shiratori



Toshio Shiratori (June 8, 1887 – June 3, 1949) was the Japanese ambassador to Italy from 1938 to 1940 and advisor to the Japanese foreign minister in 1940. He was an advocate of military expansionism, counseling an alliance between Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan to facilitate world domination. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found him guilty of war crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and he died in prison. He was one of the fourteen Class-A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine in 1978.

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 * The west has always shown a sympathetic, although patronizing, appreciation of the old Japan. Many a foreign observer would remark with a sigh: 'What a pity that things of the past, of beauty and joy forever, should be so mercilessly sacrificed on the altar of modernism!'
 * Quoted in "Behind the Face of Japan"- Page 265 - by Upton Close, Josef Washington Hall - 1942.


 * We are not imitating Hitler and Mussolini. They are imitating us. They have just discovered what we knew for centuries: that a corporate, collectivist system pays.
 * Quoted in "The American Mercury" - Page 157 - edited by Henry Louis Mencken - 1942.


 * The most serious menace to Japan comes from the Soviet Union. Numerous European countries will eventually embrace Communism. So will China and India if we just watch them with folded arms.
 * Letter to Hachiro Arita, November 1935. Quoted in "Beacon Across Asia: Biography of Subhas Chandra Bose" - Page 122 - by Subhas Chandra Bose, Sisir Kumar Bose, Narayan Gopal Jog - 1998.


 * The greatest reason for Japan's participation in the Triple Alliance lies in the fact that the three signatory powers, at this time of great change in the world situation, have the same position, the same interest, and entertain the same political views. China is not Japan's real enemy in the present incident. In reality Japan is fighting Britain and America. The first thing we are now required to do is to carry out our southward advance.
 * Quoted in "World order in historical perspective" - Page 308 - by Hans Kohn - 1942.


 * The war has now moved from China to South Eastern Asia, and is about to enter the stage of the war for all Asia.
 * Quoted in "Why We Lost Singapore" - Page 61 - by Dorothy Crisp - 1944.


 * ...the three Powers, discarding the ideologies of individualism and democracy, have adopted the principle of dealing with human society from the totalitarian point of view.
 * Quoted in "Honorable Enemy" - Page 258 - by Ernest O. Hauser - 1941.


 * Japan's true aim was to drive the white man out of Asia.
 * Quoted in "Race War" - Page 82 - by Gerald Horne.