Sir Hugh Cortazzi
Brilliant diplomat who once memorably introduced Margaret Thatcher to two sumo wrestlers
SIR HUGH CORTAZZI, who has died aged 94, was an accomplished diplomat who spent much of his career in Japan, ultimately as British Ambassador in Toyko from 1980 to 1984, and immersed himself in the country’s culture.
A fluent Japanese speaker from his wartime training as an RAF interrogator who interpreted for both Churchill and Emperor Hirohito, he deployed the language whenever possible, overcoming Court resistance to present his credentials in Japanese to the Emperor.
Cortazzi published his first book on Japanese culture – a discourse on antique maps – while in post, and in retirement not only promoted trade with Japan but produced more books and wrote regularly for the Japanese press.
Despite an uncle and a cousin having suffered on the “Death Railway”, and having himself investigated Japanese war crimes, Cortazzi was convinced the time for recriminations had passed.
When in 1988 Japan’s Ambassador in London protested at tabloid attacks on the visiting Hirohito, Cortazzi weighed in to support him. “The majority of responsible people in Britain,” he wrote, “would dissociate themselves from these unchristian and unworthy comments on a dying man.
“The Japanese sovereign … has never had autocratic power, and if he had attempted to protest publicly against the war, his views would have been suppressed and he would have been removed from the scene.”
Cortazzi was instrumental in arranging for the present Crown Prince Naruhito to study at Merton College, Oxford.
Henry Arthur Hugh Cortazzi was born at Sedbergh in the West Riding on May 2 1924, the younger son of Mervyn Cortazzi, who taught at Sedbergh School, and the former Madge Miller.
Hugh attended Sedbergh as a day boy, and in 1941 won a scholarship to read Modern Languages at St Andrews University. He set his sights on the diplomatic service after the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, said that postwar it would be opened to men without private means.
Attracted to Japan despite the wartime enmity, after five terms Cortazzi volunteered for the RAF, and spent 15 months on an interrogators’ course at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Expected to grill the few Japanese who let themselves be taken alive, he was sent to India and spent VE-DAY interrogating Indians captured fighting for the Japanese in Burma.
When Japan surrendered, he was appointed interpreter to General Dempsey, who was commanding the 14th Army in Singapore. He translated at meetings between Dempsey and the Japanese commander, whose forces had yet to withdraw.
Cortazzi reached Japan in 1946 as an acting flight lieutenant attached to British forces HQ. He helped the military police tackle black market dealings between Australian troops and Japanese civilians, and broadened his knowledge of Japanese culture despite fraternisation by British personnel being forbidden.
Demobilised in August 1947, he twice failed the Foreign Office exam before being called in because too few candidates had passed. He finally joined in October 1949, and was sent to Singapore to work for Malcolm Macdonald (son of Ramsay), Britain’s commissioner for South East Asia.
He was first posted to the Tokyo embassy in 1951, helping to negotiate a British visiting forces’ agreement. It was signed after he left in 1954, having formed a negative and bureaucratic view of Japan.
Back at the FO, Cortazzi became Japanese desk officer. He interpreted for the prime minister Yoshida Shigeru when he came to London – the first Japanese premier to do so – and translated for Churchill at the official dinner. Sir Winston chuckled over how his own “cockney Japanese” had gone down.
After a spell in anti-communist “information research”, Cortazzi moved to Bonn in 1958, then in 1961 returned to Tokyo. That year he accompanied Princess Alexandra on the first postwar visit by a member of the British Royal family. In 1963 he was appointed head of chancery.
After a spell at the FO in 1965-66, largely taken up with the post-udi situation in Rhodesia, he returned to Tokyo as commercial counsellor. Cortazzi managed to get import quotas on woollen cloth and Scotch whisky lifted, only to encounter fresh obstacles. Unlike American and German firms, British exporters were sending salesmen to Japan who could not read or speak the language. An early visitor was a “boorish and arrogant” Robert Maxwell, marketing Chambers’ Encyclopaedia.
In 1969 he organised a British Week in Tokyo around a visit from Princess Margaret. Cortazzi persuaded department stores to participate, and organised a British cultural exhibition. By now enchanted with the culture, he began collecting Japanese antiques, and on the ship home in 1970 started translating Japanese fiction into English.
A year at the Royal College of Defence Studies followed, during which he interpreted for Hirohito’s first visit to Britain, and for a one-on-one between the Japanese prime minister and Edward Heath.
Posted to Washington in 1972 as commercial minister, Cortazzi got Concorde and Sir Freddie Laker’s Skytrain into US airports, and protested when Congress passed “Buy American” legislation covering equipment for the Alaska pipeline and defence materiel.
He hosted visiting British politicians, taking agriculture minister Fred Peart to the Midwest in a camper van “so he could sink beer all day.”
James Callaghan, then Foreign Secretary, wanted to send Cortazzi straight on to Tokyo as Ambassador, but was persuaded to give him headquarters experience first, as deputy under-secretary of state from 1975 to 1978.
Much of that time was spent on Hong Kong and China, visiting with Callaghan’s successor, Anthony Crosland. Cortazzi also accompanied the future Emperor Akihito and his wife on their 1976 British tour. He could not stop the Welsh Office giving them plates made of bread at a banquet; Princess Michiko did not touch her meal for fear of gravy staining her kimono.
As Ambassador in Tokyo, Cortazzi would have his own culinary issues to deal with. He recalled being with his wife when they were served carp sashimi, “beautifully decorated and ready to eat. But as we were about to pick up our chopsticks it opened its mouth and did a jump on the plate. My wife retreated … but I felt that I had to show a stiff upper lip and fly the flag even if I did feel rather like a cannibal.”
In July 1977 he met his Argentine counterpart in Rome to discuss the Falklands. Britain’s hand was weak, as the overseas development minister Judith Hart had blocked spending on a defensive airfield. When Argentina invaded he felt the Defence Secretary John Nott, not Lord Carrington, should have resigned. He also accompanied ministers to Guatemala, trying to settle a border dispute delaying independence for Belize, and to Manila, where he was blitzed by mosquitos because the smell of insect repellent upset Imelda Marcos.
Cortazzi disliked Crosland’s penchant for carpeting his officials in public, and reckoned David Owen “one of Britain’s worst foreign secretaries” for arrogance. He admired the way Carrington forced Margaret Thatcher to take the issue of Vietnamese “boat people” seriously, inviting the media to Hong Kong to see how they were living.
He finally returned to Tokyo as Ambassador in October 1980. It was a prime posting, Peregrine Worsthorne explaining after lunch with an “extremely helpful” Cortazzi: “No other embassy has such a splendid location, overlooking the moat of the Imperial Palace. No wonder the Japanese find it hard to accept that Britain is a relatively poor country.”
The Falklands conflict proved taxing for Cortazzi. He failed to persuade the Japanese to take Britain’s part; they were too concerned about their trade with Latin America. Nor was he pleased when summoned to the foreign ministry at midnight to be given Japan’s response, only to be told he could not have it because it had yet to be translated into English. Furthermore he had an Argentinian-sounding surname – while his Argentine counterpart was one Jock Macdonald. Soon after, Mrs Thatcher came to Tokyo, blaming Cortazzi personally for the level of Japanese car exports to Britain.
But it was his idea to create the lasting image from the trip, of the prime minister with two stars of sumo wrestling. One of them, Takamiyama, towering over Mrs Thatcher, told her: “You have beautiful eyes. You remind me of my mother.”
Cortazzi tried to promote the BAE 146 airliner and supported Rolls-royce in the Japanese market, but kept encountering new bureaucratic obstacles. He helped develop ICL’S relationship with Fujitsu and paved the way for Nissan to build its factory at Sunderland, leaving just before the deal was struck.
His efforts to attract Toyota were hindered by Lord Inchcape, who held the Toyota import franchise but urged the company not to open a plant in Britain because the workers were lazy. Cortazzi would recall: “Whenever I advocated more Japanese investment in Britain, my interlocutors, from the prime minister downwards, invariably suggested our industrial relations record was a major obstacle.”
He left Tokyo and retired in 1984. Soon after, he joined the board of Hill Samuel, promoting the bank’s Japanese business as it opened an office in Tokyo. He found it poorly led and wary of following up leads, and resigned in 1991.
Cortazzi also became an adviser to the Mitsukoshi department store group, and later to NEC, the Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank and Bank of Kyoto, and Matsuura Machinery, which in 1996 opened a plant near Leicester. He was also an adviser to the solicitors Wilde Sapte.
A director of Austin Rover Japan, Cortazzi called in 1990 for the voluntary agreement limiting Japanese car exports to 10.8 per cent of the UK market to be scrapped. It was time, he said, for the British motor industry to face up to international competition.
From 1985 to 1995 Cortazzi chaired the Japan Society of London, being a prime mover of the 1991 Japan in Britain festival. He was a member of the council of Sussex University, an honorary Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge and from 1984 to 1989 a member of the Economic and Social Research Council.
He was appointed CMG in 1969, KCMG in 1980 and GCMG in 1984, and held the Grand Cordon of Japan’s Order of the Sacred Treasure.
In 1990 Cortazzi was awarded the Namagata Banto literary prize. He translated numerous books, wrote an evocative memoir, and among his many other publications were Isles of Gold: Antique Maps of Japan (1983); Kipling’s Japan (1988), and Japan in Late Victorian London: The Japanese Village in Knightsbridge and The Mikado 1885 (2009).
Hugh Cortazzi married his colleague, Elizabeth Montagu, in 1956; they had a son and two daughters.