Unit 1012
will honor and always remember Chiune Sugihara, A.K.A The Japanese Schindler,
every year on 31 July, as he passed away at the age of 86 on that date in 1986.
We will remember and honor him for saving more than 6,000 Jewish refugees
during World War II and he rightfully deserves to be recognized by the State of
Israel as Righteous among the Nations. His story should be an inspiration for
us to support victims’ rights and defend the use of the death penalty.
We will
post information about him from Wikipedia and other links.
 |
| Japanese diplomat Sugihara Chiune, known as "Japanese Oskar Schindler." Chiune Sugihara (杉原 千畝 Sugihara Chiune) |
Native name
|
杉原 千畝
|
Born
|
1
January 1900
Yaotsu, Gifu, Japan |
Died
|
31 July
1986 (aged 86)
Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan |
Nationality
|
Japanese
|
Other names
|
"Sempo",
Pavlo Sergeivich Sugihara
|
Occupation
|
Vice-Consul
for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania
|
Known for
|
Rescue
of some ten thousand Jews during the Holocaust
|
Religion
|
Eastern
Orthodox Church
|
Spouse(s)
|
Klaudia
Semionovna Apollonova (m. 1919; div. 1935)
Yukiko Kikuchi (m. 1935) |
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 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 German-occupied
Poland and residents of Lithuania. Sugihara wrote travel visas that facilitated
the escape of more than 6,000 Jewish refugees to Japanese territory, risking
his career and his family's lives. Sugihara had told the refugees to call him
"Sempo", the Sino-Japanese reading of the characters in his first
name, discovering it was much easier for Western people to pronounce. In 1985,
Israel honored him as Righteous Among the Nations for his actions.
 |
| Chiune Sugihara (杉原 千畝 Sugihara Chiune) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.visasforlife.org/sugihara.html] |
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.
In 1912, he graduated with top honors
from Furuwatari Elementary School, and entered Daigo Chugaku founded by Aichi
prefecture (now Zuiryo high school), a combined junior and senior high school.
His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as 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 which
had been founded by Harry Baxter Benninhof, a Baptist pastor. 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.
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| Chiune Sugihara (杉原 千畝 Sugihara Chiune) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.pinterest.com/explore/family-issues/] |
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|
Sugihara
House, the former Japanese consulate in Kaunas
|
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 converted to Orthodox Christianity as "Pavlo
Sergeivich Sugihara" and married a Russian woman named 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
2012, Chiaki is their only surviving son. 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.
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|
1940
issued visa by consul Sugihara in Lithuania
|
 |
|
Quote
by Chiune Sugihara (杉原
千畝 Sugihara Chiune) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://christianpostersfree.wordpress.com/political-quote-posters/]
|
Lithuania
In 1939,
Sugihara 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 part of a bigger
Japanese–Polish cooperative plan. 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. 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.
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.
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. On the night before their
scheduled departure, Sugihara and his wife stayed awake writing out visa
approvals. 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!”
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, 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. 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. According to Levine's 1996 biography of Sugihara, In
Search of Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat issued 3,400 transit visas to the
Jews. 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, it
can be estimated that he helped as many as ten thousand escape, yet 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, 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. 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. 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 "Jakub Goldberg" arrived one day to Tsuruga
but were returned to the Russian port city of Nakhodka.
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.
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|
Quote
by Chiune Sugihara (杉原
千畝 Sugihara Chiune) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.hillconnections.org/ri/chiune-sugihara-03jl.htm]
|
 |
|
Quote
by Chiune Sugihara (杉原
千畝 Sugihara Chiune) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.hillconnections.org/ri/chiune-sugihara-03jl.htm]
|
 |
|
Quote
by Chiune Sugihara (杉原
千畝 Sugihara Chiune) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/chiune-sugihara-on-doing-what-is-right/]
|
 |
|
Jewish refugees at the
gate, July 1940. Thousands of Jews lined up in front of the Japanese Consulate
in Kaunas, Lithuania, hoping to receive transit visas allowing them to escape
to the Far East and to America or Palestine. [PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/sugihara.html]
|
Resignation
Sugihara served as a Consul General in
Prague, Czechoslovakia, from March 1941 to late 1942 in Königsberg, East
Prussia 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.
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 24 March 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. 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 died at the age of seven. 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 son 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.
Inspired by “Lamentations, a book of
the Old Testament, written by Jeremiah” which “suddenly came to [her] mind”,
Yukiko Sugihara urged Chiune to issue visas to save Jewish refugees. 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.
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| Chiune Sugihara (杉原 千畝 Sugihara Chiune) depicted on Eastern Orthodox icon. |
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 in the town of
Yaotsu (his birthplace) was built by the people of the town in his honor. The
Sugihara House Museum is in Kaunas, Lithuania. The Conservative
synagogue Temple Emeth, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts,
has built a "Sugihara Memorial Garden" 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 for
him. The Japanese government honored him on the centennial of his birth in
2000.
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-size 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."
He was posthumously
awarded the Commander's Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 2007, and
the Commander's Cross Order of Merit of the Republic
of Poland by the President of Poland in 1996. Also, in 1993, he
was awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania.
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| Sakura for memory of Chiune Sugihara in Vilnius, Lithuania. Widow of Sugihara and president of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus |
Biographies
·
Yukiko
Sugihara, Visas for Life, translated by Hiroki Sugihara, San Francisco,
Edu-Comm, 1995.
·
Yukiko
Sugihara, Visas pour 6000 vies, traduit par Karine Chesneau, Ed. Philippe
Picquier, 1995.
·
A
Japanese TV station in Japan made a documentary film about Chiune Sugihara.
This film was shot in Kaunas, at the place of the former embassy of Japan.
·
Sugihara:
Conspiracy of Kindness
(2000) from PBS shares details of Sugihara and his
family and the fascinating relationship between the Jews and the Japanese in
the 1930s and 1940s.
·
On
11 October 2005, Yomiuri TV (Osaka) aired a two-hour-long drama entitled Visas
for Life about Sugihara, based on his wife's book.
·
Chris
Tashima and Chris Donahue made a film about Sugihara in 1997, Visas
and Virtue, which won the Academy Award for Live Action
Short Film.
·
Japan's
largest film company, Nippon Animation, is producing an animated film on
Chiune Sugihara. The film was specially animated for television stations in
Japan and around the world. The plan is to market the film in 2008, marking
sixty years since diplomatic relations were established between Israel and
Japan. The Japanese company asked Israel's ambassador to Japan, Eli Cohen, to
help in making the film.
Notables
helped by Sugihara
- Leaders and students of the Mir Yeshiva, Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim (formally of Lubavitch/Lyubavichi, Russia) relocated to Otwock, Poland and elsewhere.
- Zerach Warhaftig, an Israeli lawyer and politician and a signatory of Israel's Declaration of Independence.
- Robert Lewin, a Polish art dealer and philanthropist.
- Leo Melamed, financier, head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and pioneer of financial futures.
- John G. Stoessinger, professor of diplomacy at the University of San Diego
- George Zames, control theorist
- Yaakov Banai, commander of the Lehi movement's combat unit and later an Israeli military commander.
- Bernard and Rochelle Zell, parents of business magnate Sam Zell
PLEASE SEE
THIS VIDEO TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SUGIHARA:
A
JAPANESE HOLOCAUST RESCUER
VIDEO
SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0lizzqOxuI
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