Overall: 8cm (3.1in) x 8.5cm (3.4in) x 0.5cm (0.2in)
Silver, gilt and gold. The rectangular convex hinged lid applied with the Imperial Japanese Chrysanthemum crest, kiku-mon, of Yasuhito, Prince Chichibu. The gilt interior inscribed ‘Presented to / Lieutenant S.G. Rivers-Smith RN / By / T.I.H. Prince and Princess Chichibu / of Japan / April 5th 1937’.
The present cigarette case was presented to Stanley Rivers-Smith when Aide-de-Camp to John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, in his role as the Governor-General of Canada. Prince and Princess Chichibu were en route to London when they welcomed in Ottawa by the Prime Minister William Mackenzie King and the Thirty-Nine Steps author on 5 April 1937.
Yasuhito, Prince Chichibu (1902-1953) was the second son of Emperor Yoshihito and a younger brother of Emperor Hirohito. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and was an ultra-right-wing militarist. After the failure of a coup d'état in February 1936, Yasuhito and his wife were sent to Europe to represent the Emperor at the May 1937 coronation of George VI travelling across Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Following the coronation in London, they visited Sweden and the Netherlands as the guests of King Gustaf V and Queen Wilhelmina, respectively. The tour ended with a visit by the prince alone to Germany where he attended the 1937 Nuremberg Rally (Reichsparteitag der Arbeit) and met Adolf Hitler. At Nuremberg Castle, he witnessed a Hitler rant, after which he commented to his Aide-de-Camp (and future convicted war criminal) Masaharu Homma: “Hitler is an actor, it will be difficult to trust him”.