[2] Nobuhiko was the third son in the family,[5] and his older brother, Tomohiko Ushiba, later was private secretary to Prince Fumimaro Konoe.
[2] By at least 1939, he was helping to run a "bureaucratic intelligence service" which spied on Nazi Germany for the Japanese government.
He flew from Berlin to Turkey (then a neutral nation), then pass over the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and Siberia before reaching Japan.
He served as Ōshima's defense counsel during the Tokyo War Crimes Trials,[2] and then went into private business.
[1][7] He was appointed a counsellor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1954, and later that year served as a delegate to the Japan-Sweden trade talks.
[1] Ushiba's overseas service began in 1955, when he was appointed deputy minister in Japan's embassy in Rangoon, Burma.
[14] He left that position to lead the Japanese delegation to the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which lasted from 1964 to 1967.
[15] When the Kennedy Round ended, Ushiba returned to Tokyo and was promoted to Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs in April 1967,[16] the highest position possible for a career official.
As The Washington Post put it: Ushiba's ambassadorship "is remembered as a tumultuous time in the two countries' relations, due to the two 'Nixon shocks' — detente with China and the devaluation of the dollar.
[17] But despite an agreement to permit additional U.S.-made textiles to be sold in Japan (signed in January 1972)[18] as well as a general Japanese willingness to lower trade barriers and assist American companies in gaining market share,[19] the Nixon administration imposed stringent new restrictions on imports despite Ushiba's pleas.
[7][20] Within two months, he negotiated and signed a major agreement easing trade tensions between the U.S. and Japan which was widely hailed.
On 13 October 1986, the Ushiba Memorial Foundation was established to provide research and new thinking on issues of global trade.