615. Yosuke Matsuoka: The ex-Oregonian who helped start World War II

In the early 1890s, a politically well-connected drug smuggler in tiny, faraway Portland took a young Japanese boy into his household as a companion for his 14-year-old son.

That little boy’s name was Yosuke “Frank” Matsuoka, and he'd grow up to be the Foreign Minister of Imperial Japan and the chief architect of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Fascist Italy, just before the Second World War.