Chiune Sugihara

Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese vice-consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, from October 1939. The posting was small, the consulate was a converted private house at Vaizganto Street 30, and the Japanese government had sent him there primarily to monitor German and Soviet military movements as the war began. The consulate had no plans to issue large numbers of visas. Sugihara had been chosen for the post because he was a Russian specialist who had spent much of the 1920s in Manchuria. He spoke Russian and German fluently. The consulate’s caseload through autumn 1939 and spring 1940 was light. The crisis came in late July 1940.

The Soviet Union had occupied Lithuania in June 1940 under the Molotov, Ribbentrop pact and was preparing to incorporate it as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Foreign consulates were being ordered to close. Refugee Polish Jews who had fled to Lithuania in 1939 ahead of the German invasion of Poland faced a closing window. Their only escape route was east, through the Soviet Union, to the Pacific port of Vladivostok and on by ship to Japan or Manchuria, with a final destination in the western hemisphere. The Soviet authorities had agreed to issue transit visas only to refugees who could show a destination visa for somewhere outside the Soviet Union. The few destination countries still issuing visas in summer 1940 included Curacao and Suriname in the Dutch West Indies, where the acting Dutch consul in Kaunas, Jan Zwartendijk, had agreed to issue what he called Curacao visas. The Curacao visa stated only that no entry visa was required to enter Curacao, which was technically true under the Dutch governor’s discretion, although the Dutch governor had no intention of admitting the holders. The document, however, was a destination visa in the formal sense and was acceptable to the Soviet authorities.

The catch was that the refugees still needed a Japanese transit visa to cross the Soviet Union and travel through Japan. On the morning of 27 July 1940, around two hundred Polish Jewish refugees gathered outside Sugihara’s consulate to ask for transit visas. He cabled the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo three times for permission to issue the visas without the formal documentation requirements. Tokyo refused all three times. Sugihara, with his wife Yukiko and his sister-in-law Setsuko, decided to issue the visas anyway. He sat at his desk and wrote them by hand, in increasing volume, for the next twenty nine days. He worked through August 1940. He continued to write visas after the consulate had been formally ordered closed. He continued from his hotel room. He continued at the railway station as he was leaving Kaunas on 4 September 1940, throwing signed forms out of the train window to people on the platform. The total he wrote in twenty nine days has been estimated at between two thousand one hundred and two thousand three hundred individual transit visas, each of which covered an entire family. The number of people who escaped on Sugihara’s papers is estimated at around six thousand. Around four out of five reached safety; the remainder were caught when the Soviet authorities subsequently changed their policy.

The escapees travelled across the Soviet Union by Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, then by Japanese steamer to the Japanese port of Tsuruga, where the Japanese authorities, despite Tokyo’s earlier refusal to allow the visas, treated them as legitimate documents and admitted them to Japan on transit. The Japanese government was at this stage still pursuing what its diplomats called the Fugu Plan, an idea floated in some Japanese government circles of using Jewish refugees as a settlement population in Japanese-occupied Manchuria for the supposed economic benefits. The plan came to nothing, but it inclined the lower levels of the Japanese state to accept the Sugihara documents in 1940 and 1941 even after they had become embarrassing in Tokyo. Most of the refugees stayed in Japan for several months and then transferred to Shanghai, where they joined the established Jewish refugee community in the international settlement and waited out the war. The community at Shanghai survived; almost all the Sugihara visa holders survived.

Sugihara was reassigned to Berlin and then to Prague, Königsberg and Bucharest. He was interned with his family at the Bucharest legation by Soviet forces in 1944 and held in Soviet custody until 1947. After his return to Japan he was dismissed from the Foreign Ministry, the official explanation being that the Ministry was downsizing after the war. The truth, recorded in postwar interviews with Sugihara and confirmed by Foreign Ministry documents released in the 1990s, was that the Ministry held the visa episode against him. He worked the rest of his life in junior positions in trading companies in Tokyo and Moscow. He retired to a small house in Kamakura outside Tokyo and died there on 31 July 1986 at the age of eighty six.

Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in January 1985. The Japanese government issued a public apology in 2000, fifty four years after his dismissal, and unveiled a memorial bust at the Foreign Ministry in 2007. The Japanese press has, in the last twenty years, embraced the case as a story of Japanese moral courage. Sugihara himself, when asked late in life why he had done it, said that to obey the Foreign Ministry’s order would have been the rational thing for an ambitious diplomat. He had decided, he said, that an ambitious diplomat was not what he wished to be.

See also

Sources

  • Hillel Levine, In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust, Free Press, 1996
  • Yukiko Sugihara, Visas for Life, Edu-Comm Plus, 1995
  • Seishiro Sugihara, Chiune Sugihara and Japan’s Foreign Ministry, University Press of America, 2001
  • Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II, Paddington Press, 1979
  • Yad Vashem, file on Chiune Sugihara, Righteous Among the Nations, 1985
  • Japanese Foreign Ministry, declassified Kaunas consulate cables of July, August 1940