Sir George Bailey Sansom GBE KCMG (28 November 1883 – 8 March 1965) was a British diplomat and historian of pre-modern Japan, particularly noted for his historical surveys and his attention to Japanese society and culture.
While he was working as private secretary to Sir Claude Maxwell MacDonald the legation gained higher status by becoming an embassy, and Sansom was present during the negotiations for the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1905.
Sansom began his literary career in 1911 with a translation of the Tsurezuregusa by Yoshida Kenkō, a major text of the Kamakura period.
He was thus encouraged to follow in the footsteps of his scholarly predecessors among British diplomats in Japan, such as Ernest Mason Satow, William George Aston and John Harington Gubbins.
In 1933 Sir Francis Oswald Lindley assigned him the task of negotiating a commercial treaty between British India and Japan.
Sansom was made a member of the Japan Academy in 1934 and in 1935 he was promoted to Knight Commander within the Order of St. Michael and St. George.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Sansom was sent to Washington, D.C., and then to Singapore, speaking to leading officials in the Royal Navy as an adviser on economic warfare.
Evacuated to Java after the fall of Singapore, he was attached to the headquarters of General Archibald Wavell, but after the fall of Java to the Japanese Sansom was evacuated to Australia, and from there back to Washington, D.C., where he remained until the end of the war as a Minister Plenipotentiary attached to the British Embassy.