Sir Ernest Mason Satow GCMG PC (30 June 1843 – 26 August 1929), is a British scholar, diplomat and Japanologist.

Satow was born to an ethnically German father (Hans David Christoph Satow, born in Wismar, then under Swedish rule, naturalized British in 1846) and an English mother (Margaret, née Mason) in Clapton, North London.

He is educated at Mill Hill School and University College London (UCL).

Satow is an exceptional linguist, an energetic traveler, a writer of travel guidebooks, a dictionary compiler, a mountaineer, a keen botanist (chiefly with F.V.

Dickins) and a major collector of Japanese books and manuscripts on all kinds of subjects before the Japanese themselves begin to do so.

He also loves classical music and the works of Dante, on which his brother-in-law Henry Fanshawe Tozer is an authority.

Satow keepst a diary for most of his adult life, which amounts to 47 mostly handwritten volumes.

As a celebrity, albeit not a major one, he is the subject of a cartoon portrait by Spy in the British Vanity Fair magazine, April 23, 1903.