Sir John Arthur Pilcher GCMG (16 May 1912 – 10 February 1990) was a British diplomat, capping a long career with a posting as Her Majesty's ambassador to the Philippines (1959–1963), Austria (1965–1967) and Japan (1967–1972).
Educated at Shrewsbury, Pilcher's entered the consular service after passing an open examination in 1935.
"[7] Although Pilcher was appropriately diplomatic in his professional duties, he was capable of extraordinary frankness in dispatches sent to Whitehall.
While there is no doubt that Pilcher was sincere, his seeming inability to recognize an inherent double standard in his views is revealing about the attitude that many British and European scholars took towards non-Europeans in the early postwar decades.
[8] For instance, the substance of a declassified 1972 letter to the Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home was published in the Japan Times in 2003.