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Chiune Sugihara

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Chiune Sugihara
A photographic portrait of Chiune Sugihara.
Born January 1, 1900
Yaotsu, Japan
Died July 31, 1986
Fujisawa, Japan

Chiune Sugihara (Japanese: 杉原千畝, Sugihara Chiune; January 1, 1900 – July 31, 1986) was a Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during World War II while serving as the consul of the Empire of Japan to Lithuania. He was one of those who appeared to have no discernible motivation other than doing the right thing, and came to be known as the "Japanese Schindler."

Contents

Early life

Chiune Sugihara was born January 1 1900 in Yaotsu, a rural area in Gifu Prefecture of the Chubu 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 Russian and German languages and later become 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 and married a White Russian woman named Klavdia. They divorced in 1935, before he returned to Japan, where he married Yukiko Kikuchi, who became Yukiko Sugihara (杉原幸子 Sugihara Yukiko) after the marriage; they had three sons. 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 become a vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. His other duty was to report on Soviet and German troop movements.

According to Dr. Ewa Palasz-Rutkowska [Dr. Ewa Palasz-Rutkowska], Sugihara would have cooperated with Polish intelligence, as a part of bigger Japanese-Polish cooperation.

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was followed by German Polish September Campaign in 1939 and Soviet Union takeover of Lithuania in 1940, many Jewish refugees from Poland 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 Japanese consulate, 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 followed an officially neutral policy towards the Jews, but demanded 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.

In July 29–31 Sugihara began to grant visas on his own initiative, after consulting with his wife. Many times he ignored the requirements and arranged the Jews with a 10-day visa to transit through Japan, in direct violation of his orders. Given his post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service, this was an extraordinary action without precedent. 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 18–20 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.

The total number is in dispute, ranging from 2,139 to 10,000; most likely it was on the lower scale, although family visas, allowing several people to travel on one visa, were also issued, which would account for the much higher figure. Polish intelligence produced some false visas. A group of 30 "Jakub Goldberg" arrived one day to Tsuruga and was returned to Russian Nakhodka.

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. 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. Most of about 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 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

The Japanese Foreign Ministry, still needing Sugihara's language and organizational skills, decided to postpone disciplinary action until his skills were no longer needed. 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 18 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 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 voluntarily resign, 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 Russian language, Sugihara went on to work and live a low-key existence in the Soviet Union for 16 years, while his family stayed in Japan.

In 1968, Jehoshua Nishri, economic attache to the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo and one of the 'Sugihara survivors' finally located and contacted Sugihara. Nishri had been a Polish teen in 1940. The next year Sugihara visited Israel and was greeted by the Israeli government. Sugihara survivors began to lobby for inclusion in the Yad Vashem memorial.

In 1985 Chiune Sugihara was bestowed the honor of the Righteous Among the Nations (Hebrew: , translit. Khasidei Umot ha-Olam) by the Government of Israel. Sugihara was too ill to travel to Israel so his wife and son accepted the honor on his behalf.

That year, 45 years after the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, he was asked why he did it. Sugihara liked to give two reasons: one, that these refugees were human beings, and the other, that they simply needed help.

Sugihara died the following year, on July 31, 1986. Sugihara Street in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania and the asteroid 25893 Sugihara are named after him. The Chiune Sugihara Memorial in the town of Yaotsu (his birthplace) was built by the people of the town in his honor.

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 千畝 for Chiune. Similarly, sugiwara is an alternative pronunciation of 杉原 his family name. Sempo was not his middle name.

Partial list of people saved by Sugihara

References

See also

Resources

Films and other media

Books

External links

 

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