In the end

This chapter, authored by historian Bert Edström, focuses on a particular episode in Swedish–Japanese relations, namely the role of Sweden’s envoy to Japan, Widar Bagge, in the last year of the war, as he became a central figure in the most realistic peace feeler to end the fighting through negotiations. Having served in Japan since 1937, Bagge was known to high-ranking Japanese officials as a friend to their country. He was contacted first by Japanese businesspeople but finally even by politicians who tried to gain a secret diplomatic channel to the Allied side while hiding the contacts from the militarists inside Japan. Willing to help, Bagge informed his Foreign Ministry about the contacts and, when he returned to Stockholm in the spring of 1944, he tried to continue the efforts of a peace settlement. In the end, the peace feeler came to naught, but the episode demonstrates the intricacies of neutral diplomacy even during the climax of the Second World War.