GEORGE NATHANIEL CURZON (1859–1925) was not continuously involved with Japan throughout his long political career but had two distinct phases of contact with her. The first was during his responsibility for Britain's relations with Japan while he was parliamentary under- secretary for foreign affairs and the Foreign Office's spokesman in the House of Commons (1895–8). The second phase was when he entered the cabinet in 1916, becoming foreign secretary from 1919 to 1924.

Few have gained as much from their years at Oxford University as Curzon. He acquired a coterie of friends at Balliol College who rose high in the political and diplomatic world. He became after graduation Fellow of All Souls and the winner of the Arnold History Prize. He showed himself to be a fluent writer and an eloquent orator. It was no surprise, therefore, when at the general election in 1885 he became Conservative MP for Southport and was appointed assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury. Throughout his long career in government service, he acquired the reputation of being the intellectual in politics and was one of the few experts on Asia in British government cirdes.

YOUTHFUL WANDERINGS

As a young man Curzon was a compulsive traveller. His first journey round the world in 1887–8 took him for six months to Canada, the US, Japan, Korea and China and thereafter followed the familiar itinerary around colonial outposts of the British Empire. In 1889 he made a journey to Central Asia and wrote a book on Russia in Central Asia in 1889. It was, however, his second journey to the Far East which is most signi£cant for our purposes. At the general election of August 1892 the Salisbury government, in which Curzon had a brief stint as under-secretary for India, was defeated and he was free to travel again. While he remained an MP, he was no longer a minister. He set off for New York and Asia. In Tokyo was his bosom friend, Cecil Spring-Rice, then a third secretary only recently arrived at the legation. Curzon was, thanks to Spring-Rice, able to meet influential political leaders including the prime minister, Itō Hirobumi, whom he questioned in the manner of a Balliol tutorial to the horror of local British diplomats.