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Japanese diplomat (1855–1911)

was a Japanese statesman and diplomat.

Komura was born to a lower ranking samurai family in the service of the Obi Domain in Kyushu's Hyūga Province (now Nichinan, Miyazaki Prefecture). He attended the Daigaku Nankō, the predecessor of Tokyo Imperial University. In 1875, he was selected by the Ministry of Education as one of the first students to study abroad under a government scholarship. At Harvard University, Komura shared lodgings with the fellow Japanese student Kaneko Kentarō. Komura graduated from Harvard Law School in 1878. While at Harvard, Kaneko and Komura visited the home of Alexander Graham Bell and spoke on an experimental telephone with a fellow Japanese student, Izawa Shunji. According to Bell, this was the first instance of any language besides English being spoken into the new invention.

In 1880, Komura joined the Ministry of Justice and, after serving as a judge of the Supreme Court of Japan, transferred in 1884 to the Translation Bureau in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1893, Komura was the chargé d'affaires at the Japanese legation in Beijing, in Qing dynasty China. In that position, he conveyed to the Chinese government Japan's intention of dispatching troops to Korea under the provisions of the Treaty of Tientsin to subdue the Tonghak Rebellion, which led to the First Sino Japanese War. During the war, Komura was appointed as civilian administrator for territories Japan had captured in Manchuria. He was also a key figure in the negotiations to end the war, culminating in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which he helped to draft. Following the assassination of Queen Min of Korea, Komura was dispatched to replace Miura Gorō as the Japanese minister to Korea. In his position as resident minister in Korea, he negotiated the Komura Weber Memorandum in May 1896 with his Russian counterpart, Karl Ivanovich Weber, to allow joint interference in Korean internal affairs by the Japanese and the Russian Empires. Komura served as Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs until September 1898, when he was named ambassador to Washington, D. C.

In September 1901, Komura became Minister for Foreign Affairs under the first Katsura administration, and he signed the Boxer Protocol on behalf of Japan. He was elevated into the kazoku peerage with the title of baron (danshaku) in 1902 and decorated with the 1st class of the Order of the Rising Sun. In 1902, Komura helped to conclude the Anglo Japanese Alliance in 1902. His tenure as foreign minister was marked with increasing tension between Japan and Russia over Korea and Manchuria, which cumulated in the Russo Japanese War in 1904–1905. After the withdrawal of Russian forces in the region, Russian diplomats Witte and Rosen and their Japanese colleagues Takahira Ochiai, Komura, and others met in Portsmouth to sign the peace treaty. During the negotiations, Witte tried to keep Russia's rights on the southern part of Sakhalin island, referring to the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875), which gave the Kuril Islands to Japan in exchange for Russian rights in Sakhalin, but Komura declared that "war cancels all treaties." The war was ended with Komura's signature on behalf of the Japanese government of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which was highly unpopular in Japan and led to the Hibiya incendiary incident. Komura also met with E. H. Harriman, the American railway magnate, to propose a joint venture between Harriman's conglomerate and Japan towards the development of the South Manchuria Railway. On his return to Japan, he found that the agreement was opposed by the genrō and so it was not implemented. Komura also met with Chinese representatives in Beijing and signed the Peking Treaty of December 1905, which transferred the former Russian rights in southern Manchuria to Japan. For those services, Komura was awarded the Order of the Paulownia Flowers in 1906 and was appointed to become a member of the Privy Council. From June 1906 to August 1908, Komura served as ambassador to Britain and was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath by King Edward VII and a member of the Royal Victorian Order. On his return to Tokyo, he resumed the post of foreign minister in the second Katsura administration and signed the Root–Takahira Agreement with the United States. His peerage title was also elevated to that of Count ("hakushaku") in 1907. Komura also played a key role in the Japan Korea Annexation Treaty in 1910 and in concluding various international agreements in 1911 to restore Japan's tariff autonomy. He was elevated to the title of Marquis ("koshaku") on April 21, 1911. Suffering from tuberculosis in his final years, Komura moved to the seaside resort of Hayama in Kanagawa Prefecture, but he died of the disease on November 26, 1911. His grave is at Aoyama Cemetery, Tokyo.

In Ryōtarō Shiba's semi historical work Saka no Ue no Kumo, Komura inherited massive debts from his father, which he had difficulty with repayment. As a result, he wore the same frayed frock coat for years, regardless of season or occasion. That, combined with his short stature and a large mustache, led to the derisive nickname of "the rat minister" in the diplomatic community in his early career. In the Japanese Taiga drama adaptation of Shiba’s work, the role of Komura is played by actor Naoto Takenaka.