One of the many contested issues in the sovereignty dispute over the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands is whether China ceded title to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. In this post, I’ll briefly explain the competing textual arguments under the Treaty and then explore the question of meaning from an angle that is often overlooked: whether a first-hand, historical account of the Treaty negotiations from a Japanese official named Munemitsu Mutsu favors the contemporary position of either party. Mutsu’s account is valuable to the ongoing debate because he wrote it shortly after the negotiations concluded and, as the Japanese foreign minister and Tokyo’s chief representative at Shimonoseki, he possessed intimate and unsurpassed knowledge of the discussions that occurred. I obtained the account from Kenkenroku: A Diplomatic Record of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95, which was edited and translated by Gordon Mark Berger in 1982.