Ernest Mason Satow

Who was Ernest Mason Satow?

Sir Ernest Mason Satow GCMG PC;, was a British scholar, diplomat and Japanologist.

Satow was born to an ethnically German father and an English mother in Clapton, North London. He was educated at Mill Hill School and University College London.

Satow was an exceptional linguist, an energetic traveller, a writer of travel guidebooks, a dictionary compiler, a mountaineer, a keen botanist and a major collector of Japanese books and manuscripts on all kinds of subjects before the Japanese themselves began to do so. He also loved classical music and the works of Dante on which his brother-in-law Henry Fanshawe Tozer was an authority. Satow kept a diary for most of his adult life which amounts to 47 mostly handwritten volumes.

As a celebrity, albeit not a major one, he was the subject of a cartoon portrait by Spy in the British Vanity Fair magazine, 23 April 1903.