Toshikazu Kase
Toshikazu Kase was a Japanese civil servant and career diplomat. During World War II he was a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official. Hideaki Kase is his son and Yoko Ono is his niece.
Biography
Kase was born in Chiba, Japan. After passing his Foreign Service Examination in 1925 he left Tokyo Higher Commercial College and attended Amherst College and Harvard as a Research Fellow, graduating in 1927. He took up diplomatic posts in both Berlin and London before returning to Tokyo where he was posted to the North America desk of the Japanese Foreign Office. He was on duty on the weekend of the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941.
Kase was present as part of the Japanese delegation on board USS Missouri for the signing of the treaty of surrender in 1945. In 1950 Kase published a book which gave an account of the war from a Japanese perspective.
In 1955 he became Japan's first ambassador to the United Nations.
He died, aged 101 years, in Kamakura of heart failure.
