was a

vice admiral Vice admiral is a senior naval flag officer rank, usually equivalent to lieutenant general and air marshal. A vice admiral is typically senior to a rear admiral and junior to an admiral. Australia In the Royal Australian Navy, the rank of Vice ...

in the

Imperial Japanese Navy The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN; Kyūjitai: Shinjitai: ' 'Navy of the Greater Japanese Empire', or ''Nippon Kaigun'', 'Japanese Navy') was the navy of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945, Potsdam Declaration, when it was dissolved followin ...

, educator, historian, and naval diplomat. As a member of the

Satō–Kishi–Abe family The Satō–Kishi–Abe family is one of the most prominent list of political families, political families politics of Japan, in Japan. Nobusuke Kishi, Kishi's brother Eisaku Satō and Kishi's grandson Shinzo Abe served as Prime Minister of Japan ...

, he was the older brother of two Japanese prime ministers,

Nobusuke Kishi was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan, prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. He is remembered for his exploitative economic management of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in China in the 1930s, ...

and

Eisaku Satō was a Japanese politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972. He is the third longest-serving Japanese prime minister, and is ranked second by longest uninterrupted service. Satō is best remembered for securing the return ...

Early life and education

Satō was born in

Tabuse 270px, Umashima is a town located in Kumage District, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. , the town had an estimated population of 14,411 in 6947 households and a population density of 290 persons per km2. The total area of the town is . Geography ...

Yamaguchi Prefecture is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located in the Chūgoku region of Honshu. Yamaguchi Prefecture has a population of 1,377,631 (1 February 2018) and has a geographic area of 6,112 Square kilometre, km2 (2,359 Square mile, sq mi). ...

, the son of a sake brewer from a once illustrious

samurai The samurai () were members of the warrior class in Japan. They were originally provincial warriors who came from wealthy landowning families who could afford to train their men to be mounted archers. In the 8th century AD, the imperial court d ...

family that had recently fallen on hard times. His younger brothers,

and

, would both go on to become prime ministers of Japan. Satō graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908.

Military career

From 1920, Satō was stationed in France, and in 1923, he was appointed as a staff officer in the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In 1927, he represented the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Geneva Conference on Naval Disarmament, where he argued that the Japanese Navy was nothing more than a means of self-defense and that Japan could never afford to engage in a war with a great naval power. That same year, he became Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, and the following year, he was named Captain of the cruiser '' Nagara''. In 1929, Satō represented the Imperial Navy on the Permanent Military Advisory Committee to the

League of Nations The League of Nations (LN or LoN; , SdN) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), Paris Peace ...

, and in 1930, he served as an IJN representative at the London Conference on Naval Disarmament. In 1932, he was appointed First Chief of the Education Bureau, Ministry of the Navy, and later served as vice principal of the Naval War College. In 1938, he was promoted to Vice Admiral and assigned to command the Japanese naval station at Port Arthur, but was transferred to the reserves in 1940 due to ill health.

Later life

Upon his retirement, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. Thereafter, he embarked on a second career as a naval historian, writing ''A Fifty-Year History of the Japanese Navy'' (1943). Satō died of uremia complicated by pneumonia on April 12, 1958.

References

Citations

Works cited

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Satō, Ichirō 1889 births 1958 deaths Imperial Japanese Navy admirals Tabuse, Yamaguchi Military personnel from Yamaguchi Prefecture