Chiune Sugihara

(January 1, 1900 - July 31, 1986) was a Japanese diplomat, serving as Vice Consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. Soon after the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, he helped several thousand Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan. Most of the Jews who escaped were refugees from Poland or residents of Lithuania.

Early life

Chiune Sugihara was born January 1, 1900, in Yaotsu, a rural area in Gifu Prefecture of the Chkbu region in Japan to a middle-class father, Yoshimizu Sugihara, and Yatsu Sugihara, a samurai-class mother. He was the second son among five boys and one girl.

In 1912, he graduated with top honors from Furuwatari School, and entered Nagoya Daigo Chugaku (now Zuiryo high school), a combined junior and senior high school. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a physician, but he deliberately failed the entrance exam by writing only his name on the exam papers. Instead, he entered Waseda University in 1918 and majored in English literature. In 1919, he passed the Foreign Ministry Scholarship exam. The Japanese Foreign Ministry recruited him and assigned him to Harbin, China, where he also studied the Russian and German languages and later became an expert in Russian affairs.

Manchurian Foreign Office

When Sugihara served in the Manchurian Foreign Office, he took part in the negotiations with the Soviet Union about the Northern Manchurian Railroad. He quit his post as Deputy Foreign Minister in Manchuria in protest over Japanese mistreatment of the local Chinese. While in Harbin, he converted to Orthodox Christianity^[1] and married a Belarusian woman named Klaudia. They divorced in 1935, before he returned to Japan, where he married Yukiko Kikuchi, who became Yukiko Sugihara after the marriage; they had four sons. Unfortunately, their third son, Haruki, died. Chiune Sugihara also served in the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as a translator for the Japanese legation in Helsinki, Finland.

Lithuania

In 1939, he became a vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. His other duty was to report on Soviet and German troop movements.

Sugihara is said to have cooperated with Polish intelligence, as a part of bigger Japanese-Polish cooperative plan.^[2] Details remain sketchy, but after the Soviet takeover of Lithuania in 1940, many Jewish refugees from Poland (Polish Jews) as well as Lithuanian Jews tried to acquire exit visas. Without the visas, it was dangerous to travel and impossible to find countries willing to issue them. Hundreds of refugees came to the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, trying to get a visa to Japan. The Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk had provided some of them with an official third destination to Curaçao, a Caribbean island and Dutch colony that required no entry visa, or Dutch Guiana (which, upon independence, became Suriname). At the time, the Japanese government required that visas be issued only to those who had gone through appropriate immigration procedures and had enough funds. Most of the refugees did not fulfill these criteria. Sugihara dutifully contacted the Japanese Foreign Ministry three times for instructions. Each time, the Ministry responded that anybody granted a visa should have a visa to a third destination to exit Japan, with no exceptions.

From July 31 to August 28, 1940, Sugihara began to grant visas on his own initiative, after consulting with his family. Many times he ignored the requirements and arranged the Jews with a ten-day visa to transit through Japan, in direct violation of his orders. Given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an extraordinary act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian railway at five times the standard ticket price.

Sugihara continued to hand-write visas (reportedly spending 1820 hours a day on them, producing a normal month's worth of visas each day) until September 4, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of them heads of household who could take their families with them. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit in hotel and after boarding the train, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out the train's window even as the train pulled out. Sugihara himself wondered about official reaction to the thousands of visas he issued. Many years later, he recalled, "No one ever said anything about it. I remember thinking that they probably didn't realize how many I actually issued."

The total number of Jews saved by Sugihara is in dispute, ranging from 6000 to 10,000; most likely, it was somewhere in the middle; family visaswhich allowed several people to travel on one visawere also issued, which would account for the much higher figure. Polish intelligence produced some false visas. Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 6,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Levine thinks it was far higher at around 10,000.[1] According to Hillel Levine's 1996 biography of Sugihara, In Search of Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat issued 3,400 transit visas to the Jews.[2] (Source: Booklist review) Levine reports from his research of official Japanese foreign ministry documents entitled "Miscellaneous Documents Regarding Ethnic Issues: Jewish Affairs,' vol.10, 1940 Diplomatic Record Office, Japanese Foreign Ministry, Tokyo", that he discovered one list alone of "2,139 names, largely of Poles--both Jews and non-Jews--who received visas between July 9 and August 31, 1940...It is far from complete; many who received visas from Sugihara, including children, are not on it. By statistical extrapolation, we can estimate that he helped as many as ten thousand escape; those who actually survived are probably no more than half that number." Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara visas failed to leave Lithuania in time and were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and perished in the Holocaust.

Levine discovered two documents from a Japanese foreign office file: the first aforementioned document is a February 5, 1941 diplomatic note from Chiune Sugihara to Japan's then Foreign Minister YMsuke Matsuoka in which Sugihara stated he issued 1,500 out of 2,132 transit visas to Jews and Poles; however, since almost all the names of the 2,132 people were not Lithuanian at all, this would imply that most of the visas were given to Polish Jews instead. Levine then notes that another document from the same foreign office file "indicates an additional 3,448 visas were issued in Kovno for a total of 5,580 visas" which were likely given to Jews desperate to flee Lithuania for safety in Japan or Japanese occupied China. Moreover, there were also "some Jesuits in Vilna who were issuing Sugihara visas with seals that he had left behind and did not destroy, long after the Japanese diplomat had departed" which means that some Jews could have escaped Europe with forged visas issued under Sugihara's name.

Many refugees used their visas to travel across the Soviet Union to Vladivostok and then by boat to Kobe, Japan, where there was a Russian Jewish community. Polish ambassador in Tokyo, Tadeusz Romer, organised limited help for them. From there, 1,000 departed to other destinations such as the United States and the British Mandate of Palestine. The remaining number of Sugihara/Zwartendijk survivors stayed in Japan until they were deported to Japanese-held Shanghai, where there was already a large Jewish community. Others took a more southerly route through Korea directly to Shanghai without passing through Japan. A group of thirty "Jakub Goldberg" arrived one day to Tsuruga but were returned to Russian Nakhodka. Most of the around 20,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in the Shanghai ghetto until the Japanese surrender in 1945.

Despite German pressure for the Japanese government to either hand over or kill the Jewish refugees, the government protected the group. In The Fugu Plan (a book about the 1930s Fugu Plot), Rabbi Marvin Tokayer offered one hypothesis: it was in gratitude for a $196 million loan that a Jewish banker from New York, Jacob Schiff, had given to Japan; the funds helped them to victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. A broader hypothesis, which also motivated the 1930s scheme, involved the benefit of the supposed economic prowess to Jews (partly as some Japanese leaders had read anti-Semitic tracts attributing uncanny wealth and power to Jews), which was desirable to the Japanese empire. Finally, Jewish leaders pointed out that the Nazi ideal excluded "the yellow", and asserted that like the Japanese, the Jews were from Asia too.

Resignation

Sugihara served as a Consulate General in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1941 in Königsberg and in legation in Bucharest, Romania. When Russian troops entered Romania, Soviet troops imprisoned Sugihara and his family in a POW camp for eighteen months. They were released in 1946 and returned to Japan through the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian railroad and Nakhodka port.

In 1947, the Japanese foreign office asked him to resign, nominally due to downsizing. Some sources, including his wife Yukiko Sugihara, have said that the Foreign Ministry told Sugihara he was dismissed because of "that incident" in Lithuania.

In October 1991, the ministry told Sugihara's family that Sugihara's resignation was part of the ministry's shakeup in personnel shortly after the end of the war. The Foreign Ministry issued a position paper on March 24, 2006, that there was no evidence the Ministry imposed disciplinary action on Sugihara. The ministry said that Sugihara was one of many diplomats to resign voluntarily, but that it was "difficult to confirm" the details of his individual resignation. The ministry praised Sugihara's conduct in the report, calling it a "courageous and humanitarian decision."

Later life

Sugihara settled in Fujisawa in Kanagawa prefecture. He began to work for an export company as General Manager of U.S. Military Post Exchange. Utilizing his command of the Russian language, Sugihara went on to work and live a low-key existence in the Soviet Union for sixteen years, while his family stayed in Japan.

In 1968, Jehoshua Nishri, one of the Sugihara beneficiaries, finally located and contacted him. Nishri had been a Polish teen in 1940.

In that year, 45 years after the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, he was asked his reasons for issuing visas to the Jews. Sugihara gave two reasons: one, that these refugees were human beings, and the other, that they simply needed help. As Sugihara stated in a conversation with a visitor to his home near Tokyo Bay that year:

You want to know about my motivation, don't you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He cannot just help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. Some Japanese military leaders were just scared because of the pressure from the Nazis; while other officials in the Home Ministry were simply ambivalent.

People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people's lives....The spirit of humanity, philanthropy...neighborly friendship...with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation---and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.

When asked why he risked his career to save other people, he quoted an old samurai saying, "Even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge."

Sugihara died the following year, on July 31, 1986. In spite of the publicity given him in other nations, he remained virtually unknown in his home country. Only when a large Jewish delegation from around the world showed up at his funeral did his neighbours find out what he had done.

Aliases

Sugihara is also known as Sempo Sugiwara and Chiune Sempo Sugihara. Sugiwara Sempo (to use the Japanese order with family name first) was a pseudonym that he adopted when he worked in the Soviet Union from 1960 to 1975 to prevent the Soviets from identifying him as the Japanese diplomat who in 1932 outsmarted them and obtained a very good deal for Japan when it purchased the Northern Manchurian Railroad. Sempo is not a distinct name but another way of reading the Chinese characters for Chiune. Similarly, sugiwara is an alternative pronunciation; his family name. Sempo was not his middle name, as Japanese names do not have middle names.