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Toshio Shiratori Quotes

Toshio Shiratori was the Japanese ambassador to Italy from 1938 to 1940, adviser to the Japanese foreign minister in 1940 and one of the 14 Class-A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni.

Shiratori served as Director of Information Bureau under the Foreign Ministry from 1929 to 1933. He served as Ambassador to Sweden and non-resident Ambassador to Finland from 1933 to 1936. Grand Cross of the Royal Swedish Order of the Polar Star 1939. He was appointed ambassador to Italy, serving from 1938 to 1940, and became adviser to the foreign minister in 1940. He was an advocate of military expansionism, counseling an alliance between Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan to facilitate world domination.

Shiratori was found guilty of conspiring to wage aggressive war by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in November 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison of laryngeal cancer in 1949.

On October 17, 1978 Shiratori was one of fourteen Class-A war criminals controversially enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine. A memo from Emperor Hirohito, disclosed in 2006, revealed that he stopped visiting Yasukuni Shrine from 1978 until his death in 1989, because "they even enshrined Matsuoka and Shiratori." Wikipedia  

✵ 8. June 1887 – 3. June 1949
Toshio Shiratori photo
Toshio Shiratori: 7 quotes0 likes

Famous Toshio Shiratori Quotes

“Japan's true aim was to drive the white man out of Asia.”

Toshio Shiratori

Quoted in "Race War" - Page 82 - by Gerald Horne.

“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!”

Toshio Shiratori

Quoted in "Behind the Face of Japan"- Page 265 - by Upton Close, Josef Washington Hall - 1942.

“…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.”

Toshio Shiratori

Quoted in "Honorable Enemy" - Page 258 - by Ernest O. Hauser - 1941.

“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.”

Toshio Shiratori

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.

“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.”

Toshio Shiratori

Quoted in "The American Mercury" - Page 157 - edited by Henry Louis Mencken - 1942.

“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.”

Toshio Shiratori

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.”

Toshio Shiratori

Quoted in "Why We Lost Singapore" - Page 61 - by Dorothy Crisp - 1944.

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