Chiune Sugihara

Chiune Sugihara

A photographic portrait of Chiune Sugihara.

Chiune Sugihara
Native name 杉原 千畝
Born (1900-01-01)1 January 1900
Yaotsu, Japan
Died 31 July 1986(1986-07-31) (aged 86)
Kamakura, Japan
Nationality  Japanese
Other names "Sempo", Pavlo Sergeivich Sugihara
Occupation Vice-Consul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania
Known for Rescue of 5,558 Jews during the Holocaust
Spouse(s) Klaudia Semionovna Apollonova (m. 1919; div. 1935)
Yukiko Kikuchi (m. 1935)
Children Hiroki, Chiaki, Haruki, Nobuki (only remaining son alive)
Awards Righteous Among the Nations (1985)

Chiune Sugihara (杉原 千畝 Sugihara Chiune, 1 January 1900 – 31 July 1986) was a Japanese diplomat who served as Vice-Consul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania. During World War II, he helped 6,000 Jews to leave the country by issuing transit visas so that they could travel to Japanese territory, risking his career and his family's lives. The Jews who escaped were refugees from German-occupied Western Poland or Russian-occupied Eastern Poland, as well as residents of Lithuania. In 1985, Israel named him to the Righteous Among the Nations for his actions, the only Japanese national to be so honored.

Sugihara had told the refugees to call him "Sempo", the Sino-Japanese reading of the characters in his given name, discovering it was much easier for Western people to pronounce.[1]

Early life

Chiune Sugihara was born 1 January 1900, in Yaotsu, a rural area in Gifu Prefecture of the Chubu region to a middle-class father, Yoshimi Sugihara (杉原好水 Sugihara Yoshimi), and Yatsu Sugihara (杉原やつ Sugihara Yatsu), an upper-middle class mother. He was the second son among five boys and one girl.[2]

In 1912, he graduated with top honors from Furuwatari Elementary School, and entered Aichi prefectural 5th secondary school (now Zuiryo high school), a combined junior and senior high school. His father wanted him to become a physician, but Chiune 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 language. At that time, he entered Yuai Gakusha, the Christian fraternity that had been founded by Baptist pastor Harry Baxter Benninhof, to improve his English. 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 on Russian affairs.

Manchurian Foreign Office

When Sugihara served in the Manchurian Foreign Office, he took part in the negotiations with the Soviet Union concerning 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 got married to Klaudia Semionovna Apollonova. They divorced in 1935, before he returned to Japan, where he married Yukiko Kikuchi, who became Yukiko Sugihara (1913–2008) (杉原幸子 Sugihara Yukiko) after the marriage; they had four sons (Hiroki, Chiaki, Haruki, Nobuki). As of 2010, Nobuki is their only surviving son and represents the Chiune Sugihara family.[3] 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.[1]

Lithuania

Former Japanese consulate in Kaunas.

In 1939, Sugihara became a vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. His duties included reporting on Soviet and German troop movements,[2] and to find out if Germany planned an attack on the Soviets and, if so, to report the details of this attack to his superiors in Berlin and Tokyo.[4]

Sugihara had cooperated with Polish intelligence as part of a bigger Japanese–Polish cooperative plan.[5] As the Soviet Union occupied sovereign 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, yet it was 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. At the time, on the brink of the war, Lithuanian Jews made up one third of Lithuania's urban population and half of the residents of every town as well.[6] 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 Surinam (which, upon independence in 1975, 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.[2]

From 18 July to 28 August 1940, aware that applicants were in danger if they stayed behind, Sugihara began to grant visas on his own initiative, after consulting with his family. He ignored the requirements and issued the Jews with a ten-day visa to transit through Japan, in violation of his orders. Given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an unusual 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.

1940 issued visa by consul Sugihara in Lithuania, showing a journey taken through the Soviet Union, Tsuruga, and Curaçao

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 4 September, 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 whom were heads of households and thus permitted to take their families with them. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at the Kaunas Railway Station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train's window even as the train pulled out.

In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train. As he prepared to depart, he said, “Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best.” When he bowed deeply to the people before him, someone exclaimed, “Sugihara. We’ll never forget you. I’ll surely see you again!”[1]

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."[7]

The total number of Jews saved by Sugihara is in dispute, estimating about 6,000; family visas—which allowed several people to travel on one visa—were also issued, which would account for the much higher figure. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has estimated that Chiune Sugihara issued transit visas for about 6,000 Jews and that around 40,000 descendants of the Jewish refugees are alive today because of his actions.[2] Polish intelligence produced some false visas. Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author, Hillel Levine, also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people", but that far fewer people ultimately survived.[8] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.

The Diplomatic Record Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has opened to the public two documents concerning Sugihara's file: the first aforementioned document is a 5 February 1941 diplomatic note from Chiune Sugihara to Japan's then Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka in which Sugihara stated he issued 1,500 out of 2,139 transit visas to Jews and Poles; however, since most of the 2,139 people were not Jewish, 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 Kaunas 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.

Many refugees used their visas to travel across the Soviet Union to Vladivostok and then by boat to Kobe, Japan, where there was a Jewish community. Tadeusz Romer, the Polish ambassador in Tokyo, organised help for them. From August 1940 to November 1941, he had managed to get transit visas in Japan, asylum visas to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, immigration certificates to the British Mandate of Palestine, and immigrant visas to the United States and some Latin American countries for more than two thousand Polish-Lithuanian Jewish refugees, who arrived in Kobe, Japan, and the Shanghai Ghetto, China.

The remaining number of Sugihara survivors stayed in Japan until they were deported to Japanese-held Shanghai, where there was already a large Jewish community. Some took the route through Korea directly to Shanghai without passing through Japan. A group of thirty people, all possessing a visa of "Jakub Goldberg", were bounced back and forth on the open sea for several weeks before finally being allowed to pass through Tsuruga.[9] Most of the around 20,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in the Shanghai ghetto until the Japanese surrender in 1945, three to four months following the collapse of the Third Reich itself.

Resignation

Sugihara was reassigned to Königsberg, East Prussia[8] before serving as a Consul General in Prague, Czechoslovakia, from March 1941 to late 1942 and in the legation in Bucharest, Romania from 1942 to 1944. When Soviet troops entered Romania, they 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.[8][10]

Later life

Chiune Sugihara with his son Nobuki at Dead Sea, Israel 1970

Sugihara settled in Fujisawa in Kanagawa prefecture with his wife and 3 sons. To support his family he took a series of menial jobs, at one point selling light bulbs door to door. He suffered a personal tragedy in 1947 when his youngest son, Haruki, died at the age of seven, shortly after their return to Japan.[4] In 1949 they had one more son, Nobuki, who is the last son alive representing the Chiune Sugihara Family, residing in Belgium. He later 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, an economic attaché to the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo and one of the Sugihara beneficiaries, finally located and contacted him. Nishri had been a Polish teen in the 1940s. The next year Sugihara visited Israel and was greeted by the Israeli government. Sugihara beneficiaries began to lobby for his inclusion in the Yad Vashem memorial.

In 1985, Chiune Sugihara was granted the honor of the Righteous Among the Nations (Hebrew: חסידי אומות העולם ‎, translit. Khasidei Umot ha-Olam) by the government of Israel. Sugihara was too ill to travel to Israel, so his wife and youngest son Nobuki accepted the honor on his behalf. Sugihara and his descendants were given perpetual Israeli citizenship.

That same year, 45 years after the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, he was asked his reasons for issuing visas to the Jews. Sugihara explained that the refugees were human beings, and that they simply needed help.

“ 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 just cannot 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 by Moshe Zupnik why he risked his career to save other people, he said simply : "I do it just because I have pity on the people. They want to get out so I let them have the visas."

Sugihara died the following year at a hospital in Kamakura, on 31 July 1986. In spite of the publicity given him in Israel and other nations, he remained virtually unknown in his home country. Only when a large Jewish delegation from around the world, including the Israeli ambassador to Japan, showed up at his funeral, did his neighbors find out what he had done.[10] He may have lost his diplomatic career but he received much posthumous acclaim.[11]

Legacy and honors

Sugihara Street in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania, Sugihara Street in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the asteroid 25893 Sugihara are named after him.

The Chiune Sugihara Memorial Museum in the town of Yaotsu (his birthplace), Gifu Prefecture, in central Japan was built by the people of the town in his honor.[12]

The Sugihara House Museum is in Kaunas, Lithuania.[13] The Conservative synagogue Temple Emeth, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, has built a "Sugihara Memorial Garden"[14] and holds an Annual Sugihara Memorial Concert.

When Sugihara's widow Yukiko traveled to Jerusalem in 1998, she was met by tearful survivors who showed her the yellowing visas that her husband had signed. A park in Jerusalem is named after him. The Japanese government honored him on the centennial of his birth in 2000.[2]

A memorial to Sugihara was built in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo in 2002, and dedicated with consuls from Japan, Israel and Lithuania, Los Angeles city officials and Sugihara's son, Chiaki Sugihara, in attendance. The memorial, entitled "Chiune Sugihara Memorial, Hero of the Holocaust" depicts a life-sized Sugihara seated on a bench, holding a visa in his hand and is accompanied by a quote from the Talmud: "He who saves one life, saves the entire world."[15]

He was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross with the Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 2007,[16] and the Commander's Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by the President of Poland in 1996.[17] Also, in 1993, he was awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania. He was posthumously awarded the Sakura Award by the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center (JCCC) in Toronto in November 2014.

Biographies

Sugihara's widow with Lithuania's then president Valdas Adamkus at a tree planting ceremony in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2001.

Notables helped by Sugihara

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Yukiko Sugihara (1995). Visas for life. Edu-Comm Plus. ISBN 0-9649674-0-5.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Tenembaum B. "Sempo "Chiune" Sugihara, Japanese Savior". The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  3. ↑ (French) Anne Frank au Pays du Manga - Diaporama : Le Fils du Juste, Arte, 2012
  4. 1 2 Sugihara, Seishiro. Chiune Sugihara and Japan's Foreign Ministry, between Incompetence and Culpability. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001.
  5. ↑ "Polish-Japanese Secret Cooperation During World War II: Sugihara Chiune and Polish Intelligence". Asiatic Society of Japan. March 1995. Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  6. ↑ Cassedy, Ellen. "We Are Here: Facing History In Lithuania." Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal 12, no. 2 (2007): 77-85.
  7. ↑ Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner (1998). Japanese diplomats and Jewish refugees: a World War II dilemma. New York: Praeger. ISBN 0-275-96199-0.
  8. 1 2 3 Levine, Hillel (1996). In search of Sugihara: the elusive Japanese diplomat who risked his life to rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-684-83251-8.
  9. ↑ "The Asiatic Society of Japan".
  10. 1 2 Lee, Dom; Mochizuki, Ken (2003). Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story. New York: Lee & Low Books. ISBN 1-58430-157-0.
  11. ↑ Fogel, Joshua A. "The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies." Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 2 (2010): 313-33.
  12. ↑ http://japanvisitor.blogspot.jp/2013/03/chiune-sugihara-memorial-museum.html
  13. ↑ "Sugihara House Museum". Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  14. ↑ "Inside Our Walls". Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  15. ↑ Velazco, Ramon G. "Chiune Sugihara Memorial, Hero of the Holocaust, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles". Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  16. ↑ "2007 Order of Polonia Restituta" (pdf). Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  17. ↑ "1996 Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland" (pdf). Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  18. ↑ "Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness | PBS". Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  19. ↑ "Visas that Saved Lives, The Story of Chiune Sugihara (Holocaust Film Drama)". Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  20. ↑ "Visas and Virtue (2001) - IMDb". Retrieved 2011-04-03.
  21. ↑ Fiszman, Rachele. "In Memoriam." PS: Political Science and Politics 33, no. 3 (2000): 659-60.

Further reading

External links

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