From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 299-300:
Upon leaving the palace, Tojo directed his car first to the Meiji Shrine, then to the Togo Shrine (built in honor of the Russo-Japanese War hero Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who defeated the czar’s Baltic Fleet), and finally to the Yasukuni Shrine (where the souls of soldiers who died in the empire’s past wars were enshrined). After an hour or so of hopping between shrines in central Tokyo, Tojo returned to the army minister’s official residence. The news of his appointment had already reached the members of his staff, who congratulated him. But Japan’s new prime minister was in no mood to celebrate. He realized the enormity of the task he now faced. That evening, in his absurdly principled way, he ordered that no one from the army should enter his office, which he now declared to be purely civilian territory. He made telephone calls in an effort to fill ministerial positions. He appointed himself army minister and home minister. Then he tapped Togo Shigenori, the veteran diplomat who had served as the ambassador to the Soviet Union, to be his foreign minister.
Togo, a sixty-year-old dandy with copious graying hair, was married to a German woman and had once wished to become a German literature scholar. He was averse to Nazism; his brief tenure as an ambassador to Germany from 1937 to 1938 was terminated partly because of his frosty relationship with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Neither pro-Anglo-American nor pro-Axis, Togo was a genuine Japanese patriot. He wore his patriotism on his sleeve perhaps because he felt that no matter how successful he was in his professional career, he was vulnerable to being labeled an outsider. Born as Park [= Boku] Shigenori in Kagoshima, a southwestern city on the southern island of Kyushu, he came from a long line of Korean potters who were forcibly brought to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century and had remarkably preserved their language and culture over many generations. His father, a successful businessman, bought the Japanese family name Togo when Shigenori was five. (Contrary to popular belief, Togo was no relation to Admiral Togo, the Nelson of the East.)
On the whole, Togo was a much more reasonable and sensible choice than [Admiral] Toyoda, the departing foreign minister, had been. He was an experienced diplomat whose skills could be put to good use. Togo had his reservations. Before midnight, he went to see Tojo and asked whether the would-be premier was ready to make difficult concessions to avoid war. The stiff army man responded to the suave diplomat that things were very different now. “I do not have any problem reexamining the issue once again,” Tojo said. The reexamination implied extracting concessions from the army, including the withdrawal of already mobilized troops, in order to give the new foreign minister more room for diplomatic maneuver with the United States. Upon this pledge of honor, the unlikely Tojo-Togo team was born.
